Cecil talks about intestine size and why scientists consider humans to be omnivores:
[QUOTE=Cecil]
Like the hard-core carnivores, we have fairly simple digestive systems well suited to the consumption of animal protein, which breaks down quickly. Contrary to what your magazine article says, the human small intestine, at 23 feet, is a little under eight times body length (assuming a mouth-to-anus “body length” of three feet). This is about midway between cats (three times body length), dogs (3-1/2 times), and other well-known meat eaters on the one hand and plant eaters such as cattle (20 to 1) and horses (12 to 1) on the other. This tends to support the idea that we are omnivores.
[/QUOTE]
However, there was a question I had about this that wasn’t addressed in the column. If you think about it, humans don’t really have sharp enough nails to kill animals. If we go back to the good old cavemen days where we had no technology like we do today, then I don’t think a human has the physical characteristics to be able to hunt and kill animals. Furthermore, notice how we have to cook meat in order for it to be edible, or we get sick, so we can’t eat raw meat. The point is we have so many restrictions on how to eat meat like we can’t eat it raw, etc. In nature, this is all you could do; you would have to hunt for prey, rip it apart, and eat it raw. So it seems to me that humans weren’t naturally designed to eat meat because if we were, we wouldn’t have so many issues and restrictions with it. We could just go out and kill it [the prey] and eat it raw.
Now, that’s just how I am thinking. I was wondering if someone here could clear this up for me.
Before humans got the hang of fire. they would have eaten any meat they had raw. The reason you can get sick from raw meat now is because you don’t have to eat it raw and haven’t had to for a very long time so your digestive tract and its bacterial populations are not up to the task. (That being said, we do eat plenty of raw meat. Isn’t that the point of things like steak tartare?)
The reasons you give are some of the reasons scientists think our ancestors were scavengers.
Also, you discount our biggest hunting assets: our brains. We don’t need claws when we have sharp pointy sticks and rocks. We don’t need to be as fast as our prey when we have the ability to reason that animals chased off a cliff fall down and go boom and are yummy.
Also, very few animals kill with their claws. Most use claws to hang on while they rip out throats or snap necks. Have you ever seen someone kill a rabbit or a chicken? You jerk the head and it’s dead. No blood spilled. No claws needed.
Also, we can eat raw meat just fine. What we can’t tolerate so well is raw meat contaminated with e-coli that’s been sitting on the meat and multiplying for two weeks while we get the meat to the supermarket and sold and cooked. A small amount of fresh intestinal splatter wiped off 'cause it tastes nasty? Not generally a big deal.
Also, chimpanzees (who have human style fingernails, although larger canines) eat plenty of meat. Like our (common) ancestors, they use tools to replace anatomical weapons, and they’re quick enough to catch bugs and small rodents and monkeys.
Species have been using tools since before humans were humans (homo sapiens sapiens). We were born, as a species, already using tools.
Humans aren’t designed at all. Humans have evolved with certain characteristics, and the digestive tract suitable for an omnivorous diet is one of those characteristics. We assume that would be inefficient in animals that are primarily meat eaters or primarily vegetarian, so humans are well suited for an omnivorous diet.
[QUOTE=Anonymous User]
If you think about it, humans don’t really have sharp enough nails to kill animals.
[/QUOTE]
We don’t…but we (well, our ancestor species) have been tool users for millions of years. Before that…we were probably still tool users, just like many of our cousin species are today. Plus, we were probably scavengers, so we didn’t actually hunt…we scavenged dead or dying animals.
There is archeological evidence that humans have hunted for at least 1.5-2 million years.
Chimps eat raw meat in the wild…why do you suppose humans and pre-human ancestors couldn’t? Have you noticed that humans (today) also have problems sometimes eating raw veggies? Does that mean we couldn’t eat those either?
:dubious: I think you need to do a bit more research on this before weighing in. Humans CAN eat raw meat. Non-human but related species DO eat raw meat even today…as noted, chimps in the wild have been observed doing so. HUMANS have been observed either in the wild or domesticated doing so as well.
Addressing the myth that humans have no natural abilities to be able to apprehend meaty meals: Humans are marathoners. A physically fit human can chase most prey until the prey is exhausted and collapses. Then the teeth do their thing.
Add to that group hunting and a tactical brain which reduces chase time.
Then add to that tools and cooking… and we win the earth.
There are plenty of meaty things that can be killed and eaten by humans without weapons - in particular, insects, crustaceans, molluscs, small reptiles (and their eggs), nestling birds (and eggs), etc. Sure - mammals and birds are hard to catch (although not impossible).
If we were to make the argument that humans are only meant to eat that which they can obtain without tools, then some vegetarian foods are also off the menu - many nuts are too hard to break open, some tubers are too hard to dig up, some vegetable-based foods are inedible or poisonous until processed by cooking, soaking, etc.
It’s a silly argument. We’re capable of obtaining sustaining nutriment from a wide range of sources.
This. The problem with arguments that something is unnatural for humans because it takes tools, is that we evolved as tool users. We don’t have big meat tearing fangs at least in part because our ancestors had sharp stones to do the job, and fire to cook the meat. We didn’t need big claws to stop a fleeing animal, because we had spears.
A human with no tools is at a crippling disadvantage for the same reason a lion would be at a crippling disadvantage if you removed its teeth and claws. You’ve stripped them of what they’ve evolved to survive with.
Please. Hominids having been making rock cutting implements and pointy-sticks for killing for a couple million years now, long before H. sapiens evolved. It’s not fundamentally different than Caledonian crows manufacturing hooked twigs to fish grubs out of logs and trees.
Also, don’t assume our ancestors were killing all the meat they ate. Scavenging is a very common tactic, even among carnivores like cats, dogs, and bears.
Completely false. Note the world-wide trend for enjoying shashimi and sushi. Also foods like steak tartar. Please. People are entirely capable of eating raw flesh, some of us actively enjoy it and seek it out. Eating raw flesh is not instant illness. Where are you getting this information?
The problem here is that you are working from flawed assumptions.
We certainly can eat raw flesh
We can kill things by hand, albeit small game
It’s entirely natural for us to use tools to kill things, there are NO humans that are entirely without some sort of tools.
Really? Cats and dogs brought up on cooked meat get sick if they eat any old raw meat.
Have you ever noticed that tourists get sick by eating local food, but the locals don’t?
Humans are scavengers, just like hermit crabs. A hermit crab can’t kill a bird, but it’s normal for hermit crabs to eat birds or any other dead creature.
But fresh raw meat won’t cause sickness in small amounts. In larger amounts it may in a pet previously fed grain based food, but that’s because it’s rich and they overindulged, not because they can’t digest it.
No. I’ve noticed tourists get sick by drinking local untreated water, which the locals don’t because they’re too smart to drink the water, or the bacteria in the water is already in their gut and their system has accommodated them.
It seems to me the question seems a bit silly unless it distinguishes between distant human ancestors (before tools and fire) and more recent proto-humans. I mean, if you compare human jaws and muscles to apes, it’s pretty darn clear that the modern human species has already evolved to eat cooked food (looking at the energy requirements of human brains and the calories available from raw versus cooked food also makes this clear). So we’re already in a different category than non-human carnivores, non-human herbivores, or non-human omnivores (as fuzzy as those categories are). If anyone knows the appropriate Greek prefix for ‘cooked’ then we can coin a descriptor for Homo species.
It’s also pretty clear that pre-fire human ancestors were roughly like chimps, which are probably best categorized as ‘omnivore but mostly easier to digest plant matter like fruits’.
e.g. raw beans. Also, grains are practically worthless w/o the use of tools; if we didn’t have something to grind with, we wouldn’t have flour for bread.
Also, herbivores often have a highly complex digestive system with multiple stomachs and other adaptations necessary to digest foods like grass, such as cows.
Good old days of the caveman, was the stone age and we had tools for a long time even then. As far a eating meat raw my ancestors Native Americans routinely ate raw meat Had you been there in the day you might have been offered raw liver, kidney, eyes, belly fat, testicles, parts of the stomach, marrow from leg bones, gristle from snouts, hoofs of unborn calves and tissue from the sack they had been in. Bile from the gall bladder was sprinkled on the meat and used as a condiment.
Even today we eat, Yukhoe (ground beef), Tiger meat (beef), Steak tartare (beef or horse), Kachilaa (water buffalo), Kitfo (beef), Gored gored (beef), Crudos (beef) , Carpaccio (beef, veal, venison, salmon or tuna), Ossenworst (beef or ox), Sashimi (almost anything that was alive) all raw and without ill effects
Did our ancestors eat as much meat as we do today, probably not in most cases, there are exceptions, Inuit diet was mostly meat, but we evolved eating meat and plants. And one theory says that because we had tools and could get at fat, marrow, other animals couldn’t is one of the reasons we have such a big brain.
Probably the same place that the raw foodies get the idea that eating a handful of raw straight off the stalk grains of wheat or oats is dangerous. You would not believe the damned arguments I got into on a raw food usenet group I found myself subscribed to back in about 1997/1998 about it. [I used to grab a handful of grain to snack on as a kid wandering around out back of the summer house back when I was growing up. You would have thought I was noshing on arsenic or something. :dubious::rolleyes:]
As a paleo recipe, I always thought that pounding beef, beef fat, the local blackberries and fresh green raw oats would be pretty tasty as a pemmican recipe. Fresh green raw oats are actually rather tasty. But then again I liked to snack on dried ceci beans by sucking on them to rehydrate the skins until they got wrinkly and could be nibbled off to get to the crumbly insides.
