I’m certainty not suggesting that we are not capable, and have done my best to address the technology aspect of selective breeding of more eatable plants.
I’ve also pointed out cows are capable of digesting other cows for nutritional gain, again no studies on the health impact to the cow, save for the mad cow impact.
Wolves are capable of eating berries, and it’s documented that they do.
Because we feed dogs and cats food made of mostly corn with ash in it for some reason, does that make it their natural food? Or they simply eating what's available.
Is my dog now an omnivore?
Evidence suggests we cannot digest animal fat as easily as say carbohydrates.
Our food in the past had quite a bit to do with the seasons. Likely during winters us humans had to settle for foods less inline with our biology, namely animal based foods.
Ha ha, I would never suggest what people should or should not be. Only what some biological, and other sources might suggest is worthy of intellectual discussion.
That garden thing popped in to my head when I was thinking of the abundance vs scarcity concept. Which obviously in a catastrophic situation like a flood or the like would ruin crops, and make those sorts of foods quite scarce. Again a quagmire concept, with limited evidence, that isn’t really central to the point here. There would probably be some dogma around documenting that kinda shift.
What makes you say that? And why discount bugs? Did Og eat quarter pounders with cheese? Probably not. But he could certainly have eaten muscles off a wildebeast killed by a cave lion.
You do know that recent studies are suggesting that red meat isn’t bad for you at all, but processed meat with nitrates is? And I don’t think anyone’s considered chicken breast “bad for you” for years. Certainly no moreso than palm kernel oil.
And, as other people have said, we believe it’s quantity, not specific foodstuffs, that are at the root of our diet related illness epidemic. Because every time we think we’ve uncovered The Bad Foods, we’re wrong.
Bottom line, we have a very tenuous understanding of nutrition and the physiology of digestion, despite the thousands of articles put out every day. Nutrition is very much a science in progress. I would not hang my hat on a “meat’s bad for you physically” argument.
Your dog’s always been an omnivore. Just like those wolves.
A high intake of animal fat is linked to heart disease. The current western diet kills some of those of us with the diets highest in animal fat and superfluous calories when we’re well above the reproductive age of early man.
Early man would have eaten less calories, less meat and leaner meat, and the significance of dying of heart disease at 50 or 60 would have been insignificant compared to other risks.
This makes the argument that we’re not meat eaters because we can’t deal well with animal fat invalid.
Also, I’m not sure where you’re going with the argument from scarcity/plenty.
Human diets don’t change that much in times of scarcity, we just die more. So a large population will tend to stick with the same pattern of eating, but the availability of food will increase or decrease the size of the population.
You still seem to think there is some magical “default” state for human existence against which current activity can be judged, but this isn’t the case.
You have made numerous assertions like the one quoted, but have not given a single cite for any of them. I suspect the reason for that is none of them are true. What evidence is that animal fat is less easily digestible? What does less easily digestible even mean? Do you understand how the human digestive system works? You give no evidence of that either.
It’s undoubtedly true that the lifestyle of some contemporary humans includes a balance of foods that is not optimal. How do you make the leap from that to a conclusion about the formation of the human digestive system, one to two million years ago? We know what the digestive system looks like, and it looks like an omnivore’s system. We know how it operates, and it is perfectly capable of digesting every bit of plant and animal life on the planet. (That some of it is toxic is irrelevant to whether it is digestible.) We know that human societies do eat every bit of plant and animal life on the planet. We know that the modern technological societies that you’ve been putting down have doubled the average life span over a mere century, or 0.01% of the time we’ve been evolutionarily human. That sounds to me like the greatest feat of that entire history.
You keep saying that you want to take technology out of being human and then spend the rest of your posts talking about modern diets, modern animal feeds, and modern diseases, all of which are technology. Your logic is as faulty as your evidence. Technology cannot be removed from being human. Some anthropologists are arguing seriously that technology drove our evolution rather than the other way around. Check out The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution, by Timothy Taylor.
I doubt that you’ve ever read a book on the subject you’re been arguing and I normally wouldn’t recommend that someone start the subject with this book, since it attempts a refutation of standard beliefs and it helps to know those first. (Because it’s a new argument, I’m not even sure how much of the book I accept myself. It needs more time and development.) But it is so directly applicable to everything you wrongly believe that I think it would help your thinking tremendously.
That would somehow depend on how you define modify and store for later use. A chimp in a zoo in Sweden has been observed stashing away stones to throw at visitors later on.
Being cynical, I would say you have to exclude bugs in order to arrive at the OP’s conclusion. I can’t help thinking that the conclusion precedes the reasoning given to support it.
Fair enough. Although by defining humans as “tool-using animals” the term then becomes redundant as soon as “tool using” starts to become part of the definition of animal (which is what Goodall’s research opened up).
It depends on what you mean by “animal.” But I don’t know of any widespread usage that means humans and apes but nothing else. Surely there are still some animals known not to be tool using.
I think another error the OP is making is in understanding the nature of evolution with respect to lifespan. It’s undoubtedly true that the modern American diet is unhealthy for people. If you eat fast food consisting of a lot of meat, cheese and carbs you will have health problems…but you will have them long after your child bearing years in most cases. So, while the OP seems to associate the bad diet with some unspecified lesser ability to digest meat, the reality is that even with such an unhealthy diet, evolutionarily speaking we are golden…we’ve already had our kids before we’re likely to kick over from too much fat in our diets.
Basically, it boils down to our physiology, as numerous posters have pointed out…if you look at our digestive system, it’s pretty obvious that it’s that of an omnivores. Same with our teeth. The fact that we need nutrients from both meat and plant materials is also a strong indication.
I don’t know if anyone addressed this (haven’t read everyone reply yet…sorry), but:
How do you arrive at this conclusion? Based on what? Even leaving aside the fact that man clearly evolved to BE a tool user, and a ‘man’ without tools isn’t even a chimp or monkey (since both use tools, even if it’s just a rock or a stick), why take bugs out of the equation? Do they somehow not count? Many primates eat them whenever they can find them.
Also, what about carrion? I’ve seen a lot of speculation that early hominid ancestors didn’t hunt for meat, but instead ate carrion or stole the kills of other predators.
A man without tools isn’t really a HUman…but that still wouldn’t make him or her a vegetarian.
Goddard’s research did not add tool-using to the definition of animal; it merely showed that there are non-human animals that use tools. Most animals do not. Hell, most primates do not. (Most varieties, that is. I suspect that humans make up more than half the primate population at this point.)
I used to eat grass - you know, lawn grass - cellulose. Does that make me an herbivore by nature?
I once at a roly poly. Does that make me a carnivore by nature?
In America, kids go hunting for grasshoppers so we can put them on hooks and use them as bait for fish. In Africa, kids go hunting for grasshoppers and eat them as a snack.
Human ancestors were hunting with tools before they were human.
We are omnivores by nature, and use our technology to improve our access to food of both types, as we have always done.
That’s a pretty interesting notion carrion, I don’t think we can do it, but maybe. The PH of our stomach I don’t think reaches the level to kill harmful bacteria, such as ecoli. Which meat eating animals can handle, because the PH of their stomach is NOT attuned to killing off dangerous pathogens. Obviously if we could handle meat, we should be able to digest and kill meat pathogens such as ecoli, which the “omnivorous” dog, can handle easily.
I think where we have collectively arrived is man with out technology is not man, right. He can’t hunt, can’t farm, can’t eat cant survive. My hypothetical plenty scenario/mans natural inclination concept didn’t resonate with anyone, so I’m dropping that. If you search for the fallacy in a metaphor, or hypothetical scenario, you will likely miss the whole point.
Look for the rest of you, the human body pretty clearly, can’t handle animal fat. Jump all over what ever new study you want, it’s been consistent over the years. heart disease, and red meat, pretty clear link, not going to discuss that somehow not being a real thing. not going to take the time to site sources, that red meat is shown to be bad, if you want to find them you will, if you want to find sources that say it’s the best thing ever for you, you will. (Welcome to the disinformation age.) Bottom line I’m not interested in trading web links back and fourth all day. That being said to the guy who mentioned palm oil, I think it was, I assume it’s a very think heavy oil solidifies at room temperature? Maybe it’s better to say humans can’t handle thick oils/fats, but those are mostly from animal fats. There are other health issues associated with eating animals, bottom line our biology is NOT optimized for it.
Let's leave the heart disease issue lay, since everyone is having trouble with it, and move on to the even simpler to understand PH/ecoli issue. Or why meat seems to give us "food poisoning".
Except for artctic peoples, who eat traditionally ate almost nothing BUT animal meat and fat and didn’t have notably shorter lifespans or noticeably high heart disease so long as they as maintained traditional activity levels… Then again, they also ate almost exclusively wild meats, so maybe that’s the difference?
“Carrion” just means “already dead” - there is no requirement that it be festering in the hot sun for a week first. First of all, on the African savanna or scrub or wherever we are supposed to have evolved no meat sitting out in plain sight is going to last a week. If our ancestors were raiding the kills of other carnivores the meat might be relatively fresh-killed. More fresh, in fact, that what we buy at the supermarket these days.
And truthfully, before the 20th Century, and still in many places in the world, people were/are riddled with parasites. Humans have been using fire since we first became human - in fact, the hominids species that proceeded us were using fire - and that would also take care of a lot of parasites and bacteria, too.
This is not obvious at all. In addition to humans having evolved with tools, humans have also evolved with cooking. The references to carrion are regarding very early humans, not the current “natural” state of the human.
What’s the point again?
This is clearly nonsense. Can you offer an objective definition of what you mean by “can’t handle”?
All animals face disease pathogens, from many sources.