Yes, chimps have been observed making a stick termite ready and then keeping it for later use.
Our teeth show otherwise. Our molars grind. Our canines tear. Incisors bite right through. These are clearly the teeth of an omnivore.
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.
That’s a good point cooking does allow us to kill most harmful bacteria in meats, that would render us sick. Lets call it a pre-digestive tool, it also helps break down plants cellulose, so we cannot better eat that. The end result of plant cooking seems to be more in line with what we are set up for. That does not mean you cannot physically eat the meat, much as a cow can eat other cows properly prepared. However because it is not their natural food it has negative health effects. Does that make them omnivores?
What’s the point again?
Reread it, you guess at that point. I’ll help you along.
This is clearly nonsense. Can you offer an objective definition of what you mean by “can’t handle”?
Lacks a mechanism to quickly digest or break down or “get rid of efficiently”. That mechanism is speculative, because it does not yet exist in humans. The result of being a diseased state. The remedy being reduction of intake. Cripes, the bodies “idea” to deal with it is to store it on arterial walls. How can you suggest that is “natural”, or anywhere along the lines of efficiency nature employes in her evolutionary scheme. It’s so obviously a back up system, as with the bodies method of converting protein into carbohydrates. I don’t know how to convey that more simplistically then that. Yes if I were to do a study on it I would look for the effects in natural meat eating animals as to how they deal with heavy oils, or fats.
All animals face disease pathogens, from many sources.
Yes correct, and in animals that can process meats their stomach acid is more potent and “kills” them, as with bacteria that form on rotten meat. If your are curious about this you and a dog sample some raw chicken and note the effects first hand in both instances. But I think we covered this in the first part. We defiantly need fire for meat.
or granted digestive bacteria we no longer possess.
Cool, about the chimps, I had no idea.
I now have to double back on my links statement, but really, look at this photo.
Take a real omnivore tooth pattern, a bear, compare it to a human beings. Why does the humans teeth looks more like a cows?
Does that even give you a moments pause?
Look at this herbivores teeth. Opps, they eat small animals scratch that. They are omnivores. Hence the teeth!
Damn! Got in the edit before I could post to correct you. Babboons are indeed omnivores.
They don’t. I’d say human dentition more resembles the ursine than the bovine.
Actually there are some similarities in the incisors, but you can also compare those to horse teeth just as easily, which lack the tell tale giant canines. However I don’t think tooth pattern is a great argument Our closest relative the chimp, is also very telling. Either they developed those chompers independently when our species broke lines, or we had them at some point and they shrunk. Chimps are omnivores though, and their teeth hold up to that.
Humans you have to concede, don't have that marked pattern we are seeing. Which I nave NO information on as to why, but would make a great bit of evolutionary research. They incisors seem common to Most primates, including the herbivore gorilla.
Take it how you will, but I don’t think that is the straw the is going to break the camels back for me. If anything just based on this is sorta pushes to the herbivore argument.
However our tooth pattern could have something to do with oral communication. But again, I do not have that info.
How do you figure that? Seriously, what is your line of reasoning here?
All omnivorous animals seem to have giant incisors, including camels “har har”.
We don’t.
Here is an article on lucy.
Her tooth pattern is consistent with ours. Look at the speculative diet.
There are a few articles that suggest lucy ate meat, however they also incorrectly say the human brain runs on meat, which is flat out wrong, it runs on carbs.
Though marrow would seem to be an opportunistic food that would be preserved enough(protected in bone) to not become infested with something nasty that would impact digestion. That makes some sense to me. Obtaining it would be similar to cracking nuts. I’d have to look into the evidence more, since they are also suggesting a fallacy.
Those interested in this question might like the recent book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham. He makes a very good case that eating meat – specifically, cooked meat – played a major role in directing human evolution to where we are now. One point he makes is that our large brains need a lot of calories, and that we’d never get enough if we spent all our waking hours chewing raw carrots and bean sprouts. In addition to driving our physical development, cooking advanced human social development as well. An excellent book.
I’ve never read the book but heard studies along those lines, does the author take into account that cooking also make raw carrots and bean sprouts far more digestible as well.
I just want to make sure the whole picture is presented. I mentioned this already in a previous post.
Simply put we cant extract as much nutrition from raw plants, cooked on the other hand. Well I’m not pressing this statement as being strong one way or the other, simply pointing out the other side of the coin.
It would be interesting to know what was first cooked. Though the circumstances at my best guess, would be impossible with out doc browns time machine.
Well, it’s not exactly original…it’s pretty standard anthropology and generally accepted that humans ate (and in hunter gatherer societies today still do eat) carrion. I’m unsure why you think this is an incredible statement, or why you seem unsure.
Huh? What do you base this on? You do realize that ‘carrion’ doesn’t equal ‘completely rotted’, right?
Do you have a cite for this incredible statement? There are several dishes in the world that I can think of off the top of my head that consist of partially or even fully rotted meat, so I’d love to see what you base this on.
Again, what is your cite for this?
It doesn’t resonate because it’s bunk…humans evolved to be tool users. Take away the tools and you don’t have a ‘natural human’…you have something that doesn’t exist in nature and hasn’t for millions of years. If you want to drop this line of thinking, however, that’s fine by me.
What are you talking about?? Do you have a cite for this assertion?? Humans CRAVE animal fats…it’s one of the problems we have today. We evolved to crave the stuff like candy, and now that we can get all we want we (western civilization) gorge on the stuff.
You are the one jumping through hoops here. You have yet to provide any citations backing up your patently absurd assertions. We ‘can’t handle animal fats’?? There are groups of humans who almost solely consist on animal fat alone! Of COURSE we can handle the stuff. Like with anything, however, too much of a good thing is bad for us.
No, it’s not, but even if your assertion here were so, you don’t seem to get the fact that it doesn’t matter. When early humans were evolving they didn’t live long enough to worry about stuff like heart disease. They were dying of acute diseases, not chronic ones. The advantages we gained from eating meat far outweighed the disadvantages, since most humans wouldn’t live long enough to die from them (and since there wasn’t much chance that early humans would have the access to them that we do today).
You blew up my irony meter. 
Then you aren’t interested in really discussing this topic. What you are interested in is asserting your own ill informed theories that have no basis in scientific fact or data. Yours is the standard vegetarian/vegan line and it’s been debated on this board in the past to death. The REAL ‘bottom line’ is you are wrong…humans clearly did evolve to eat meat. That doesn’t say anything about whether we should eat so much meat (or, today, that we have to eat any, since we have the technology and science to allow vegans to live a completely meat free existence, with careful planning of their dietary needs).
It’s incorrect to say that humans can’t handle animal fats, full stop. You are simply wrong. We clear can and do handle them. That they may lead to health problems later in life has nothing to do with whether or not we can handle them, or whether or not humans evolved to eat meat, which we clearly did. You don’t seem to be tracking on this point, sadly.
I’d say the only one having trouble with the heart disease assertion is you, and the trouble is you don’t seem to grasp the difference between acute and chronic disease, or the concept that, evolutionarily speaking, you only had to live long enough to pass on your genes to be successful.
You also have failed to back up your assertion about PH and ecoli issues wrt the lack of ability for humans to eat meat.
It doesn’t. I’m over 50 years old, have 4 children and even a grand child and I’ve eaten meat and animal fat pretty much all my life. Evolutionarily, I’ve succeeded. Even if I keel over tomorrow, it doesn’t matter from the perspective of passing on my genes. So…meat has patently not prevented me from doing this.
-XT
I know the OP isn’t interested in ‘trading cites’, but I found this article on NatGeo from 2005 that is interesting:
And this:
-XT
Absolutely, that’s a major part of his argument. As the title of the book suggests, it’s as much about cooking as it is about eating meat, for exactly the reason you cite: you get more nutrients from more foods if they’re cooked first. The raw food crowd refuses to admit this, often arguing that they, or vegans in general (even if they cook), are healthier than human carnivores. What they often miss, though, is that the possible downsides of meat eating, e.g., high cholesterol, didn’t affect our ancestors many 100s of thousands of years ago. Chronic diseases of old age aren’t much of an issue in a society when no one lived to old age anyway.
If you can’t tell me, I can’t guess.
What in the Sam Hill are you talking about? That’s cholesterol, not “animal fat”, and it’s found in plants, too. And it’s not stored on arterial walls like a squirrel stores nuts, it’s placed there (as far as prevailing theories go) either because of a genetic quirk (which not nearly all humans have) or because of bacteria on the artery walls needing a “patch” so they don’t spread. (I quite like that last theory, actually.)
Or really fresh meat and the ability to teach our young not to eat the intestines. Do you think e coli is just swarming around the skeletal muscle of a freshly killed gazelle? It’s not.
Y’know, I almost feel like we’re picking on you here, except that you keep finding new things to be wrong about.Gorillas are omnivores, too.(I will grant you that this is relatively new information. Just one more example of how things we think we’re sure about turn out not to be so, and why lots of education and research is needed.)
Alright, I’ll get you’ve sources, you’ve taken the time to really dog me on a few strong points. Give me a few.
And yes evolutionarily you are successful. But your skipping over my point about cows we feed cows, they are too in their way successful in terms of propagation, but that is not their natural diet. You are not seeing that aspect of what I’m saying.
The natural food of the cow, is grass. But due to environmental circumstances their only opportunity is to eat, not grass. So, I'm not arguing that the mammalian digestive system is not dynamic. Instead, I am arguing that a given species digestive system is optimized for a given food class. That would be their natural food. An anteater may be able to survive on a ground up carrot/mushroom slurry long enough to propagate, that does not make carrots it's natural food, in the sense that I'm speaking of. Surely you can see that.
I’ll dig up your sources.
I think I can safely speak for us Dopers when I say that we completely understand what you’re saying. It’s just that we disagree in the extreme and have cites to back us up.
Still looking up sources here that are not listed on some extremist veggie web site. A somewhat odious task.
Let me phrase it as simply as possible.
While we are capable of digesting quite a bit of stuff, as are most mammals. Meat eating is not optimal to our long term digestive process, there are arguably to many side effects. I therefore submit, that meat eating is a learned, or cultural behavior, that seems somewhat contrary to our biological make up.
Now I have to find a crap load of sources next post should be interesting.
“A carnivore’s stomach also secretes powerful digestive enzymes with about 10 times the amount of hydrochloric acid than a human or herbivore. The pH is less than or equal to “1” with food in the stomach, for a carnivore or omnivore. E. Coli bacteria, salmonella, campylobacter, trichina worms [parasites] or other pathogens would not survive in the stomach of a lion or other carnivore due to such high stomach acidity.”
http://www.squidoo.com/carnivore-herbivore-comparison
Keep in mind I’m doing my best to find as unbias sources as possible, with full knowledge, that there might be a flub or two.
Here we have a good example of the acidity problem, which we humans have addressed with the pre-digestive process of cooking. To the fellow who wrote about the fresh killed gazelle, I’m not sure what pathogens a human might risk contracting from a fresh killed gazelle if any.
You might ask yourself how you would feel about eating freshly killed raw gazelle meat, over several bananas, if both were presented and you were starving.
Let’s try this again…
Hominids were using fire before Homo sapiens evolved. Our lineage evolved post-use-of-fire. Arguably, we are adapted to using it and it’s just as natural for us as honeypot ants storing liquids or leafcutter ants and their underground mold farms. Carnivores evolved strong stomach acid. We are descended from species that used fire for much the same effect. Therefore, it is natural for us to use fire to cook our food. Our ancestors have probably been doing it for million years or more.
Cow, however, have only been eating other cows for, at best, a few decades. Not enough time to adapt to the practice via evolution.
I’d go for the bananas. Why? Because I’m guessing that gazelle wasn’t raised in accordance with kashrut or ritually slaughtered by a kosher butcher. No worries about the bananas.
My point is that anybody participating in this discussion has cultural and psychological hang ups which have nothing to do with our biology. Most Americans find the idea of eating horse meat revolting. This teaches us nothing about the edibility and nutrition of horse meat.