Why is it that carnivore animals can eat raw meat, but humans cant? Millions of years ago, were humans at any time able to eat raw meat?
Humans can eat raw meat. Never heard of of Sushi? Or Steak Tartare?
It’s just that cooking meat makes it more digestible, and kills off parasites and bacteria and such that might make us sick. And yes, carnivorous animals do get parasites and illnesses from the raw meat they eat.
I love steak tartare. One of my more interesting gustatory experiences happened when I was gave a talk at the University of Kumamoto (which is on the western island of Japan). My host was taking me to dinner and asked what type of food I wanted. Somewhat insouciantly, I said I wanted to try the regional speciality (one thing I discovered in Japan is that there is no such thing as “Japanese cuisine”, but many regional ones). He said fine and made a reservation. As we were walking over he asked if I knew what the regional specialty was. I said I didn’t. “Raw horsemeat”, he said. I gulped. But I went along. It was pretty much the same as tartare, as a matter of fact. The other thing they served was raw blowfish, but not the kind to which poison had been added to make fugu. That didn’t have much taste at all.
Getting back to the OP, I have heard a theory that people tended to wait till the meat was somewhat “high” and that is why we age meat instead of serving it really fresh.
Just a bit of a nitpick…they don’t add poison to fugu. There are parts of the fish that are deadly poisonous so if you don’t filet it just right you will get more than just the tingling of the lips.
As I understand it, one of the arguments for vegetarianism is that carnivores, such as cats and dogs, have very short digestive tracts so that they can expel the meat from their bodies very quickly before it rots.
Herbivores like cows, on the other hand, have very long digestive tracts because it takes a long time to digest vegetable material and vegetables don’t rot like meat does so there is no danger in keeping it in your body for a long period.
Humans have very long tracts which suggests we are not really built to eat meat.
I don’t know whether the above is true as an argument for vegetarianism but it’s one possible answer to the OP as to why humans can’t eat raw meat - our digestive tract is too long.
Not so much to expel the meat before it rots, as simply due to the fact that meat is much easier to digest than plant matter, so carnivores don’t need complex digestive tracts.
Define “very long”. From what I heard, the digestive tract of a human is intermediate between that of a herbivore and that of a pure carnivore. It’s about typical for a omnivore. After all, we can’t digest bulk raw plant matter like a cow can.
Fresh kill raw meat is far less dangerous than raw meat that’s be stored, shipped, handled.
Tackle a Wildebeast and rip him apart with your jaws. You’ll be fine.
Jojo that is flawed on so many levels I hardly know where to start.
As others have pointed out humans can eat raw meat. They do so daily worldwide and have done so for the last 150, 000 years at least. I can find you numerous accounts of people worldwide eating raw meat from all periods of history and all cultures.
That aside the idea that digestive tract length means anything is pure bunkum. Chimpanzees, pigs and bears are indisputably omnivorous and eat raw flesh routinely. All have longer intestinal tracts than people.
Aside from that even supposedly herbivorous animals like sheep are carnivorous when necessary.
Carnivores don’t have short digestive tracts to expel meat before it rots. Carnivores have short digestive tracts mostly for the simple reason that they don’t need long ones. Meat is far easier to digest than plant food so there is no sense carrying around 30 feet of superfluous gut. The shortening may have some effect on rendering the animal less prone to food poisoning, but animals like pigs have no problems with long digestive tracts and they eat rotten carrion on a regular basis.
Meat does not ‘rot’ in your digestive tract. It gets digested. You could leave meat in your gut for 6 months and itwon’t rot. In fact bears do exactly this. Yes there is some microbial action taking place that could be describes as rotting at a stretch, but in that case vegetable matter rots even more than meat. In the case of cellulose the only way animal’s can eat it is to let it rot completely. Cattle and horses can’t actually digest grass. This brings us to the real reason ruminants avoid meat. Their stomachs are big anaerobic digetors. If they eat meat and there is even one botulism spore on that meat the entire stomach turns into a botulism production vat the animal dies at short notice.
In reality human’s digestive tracts have gotten shorter through our evolutionary history as a result of eating a higher quality diet, but it still rmeains at the lower end of the omnivore range because we occasioanlly still needed to survive on vegetables. Meat and fruit was not always available.
Good post, Blake. Normally, I can find at least one major point to disagree with you on ;), but that’s not so here. However, I do have to question the one botulism spore thing. Do not ruminants have some defense against unwanted bacteria invading via the digestive tract?
Hey I never said I believed it, I was just putting it forward as something I heard once.
Most of the other large apes, like gorillas and orangutangs, are completely herbivorous. So why not us?
I think the vegetarian argument says that man never ate meat before we discovered fire. We used our brain to discover fire and then we discovered that cooking meat makes it safe to eat.
While I’m not obsessive about it, I have seen what is expelled from my digestive tract, and I’m certain I’ve never seen anything that looks like non-rotten meat 
Gorillas have been observed eating ants and termites. They’re not vegetables, are they? Orangutans often eat insects and bird’s eggs. Not vegetables either.
The vegetarians would be wrong. There is plenty of speculation and some evidence to suggest that early humans were opportunistic eaters and scavangers. Plus there is another important kind of meat we modern westerners don’t like to think about and that is insects. Tasty, easy to catch and chock full of protein and fat they were almost certainly a major part of our ancestor’s diet. I would go so far as to say that in no point in human history have humans lived without at least a small part of their diet being meat, our versatility allowed us to survive and spread across the globe.
To add to my previous post, chimpanzees, which are arguably our closest living relatives, will occassionally killl and eat monkeys (and, certainly, other small animals). They hunt them as a team effort. I’ve seen video of this happening, and it’s quite fascinating.
AFAIK it is entirely dependant on maintaining a healthy gut flora and avoiding ingestion of nasties. There is not much you can do about the inside of the gut since it is not connected to the blood supply. There’s just no mechanism available for any immune response.
No they aren’t. That’s a rather popular myth. With the exception of one of the gorilla species/subspecies all the great apes have been observed to eat meat. The chimps do so in the method most similar to people wit organised hunts of large prey, but that’s hardly surprising since they are most closely related. However the gorillas and orangs eat whatever meat they can get. The gorillas eat insects while the orangs have even been observed eating nestling birds.
It’s really asking wh not us or the other members of the chimpanzee branch of the great ape family tree. The other chimps are as carnivorous as us. There’s no real good answer aside from “because we can”.
Protein is the limiting nutrient in the diet of non-carnivorous mammals. It dictates how successful the animal s going to be. Any additional protein that is available provides a survival advantage. Gorillas, chimps and apes adopted different lifestyles. Gorillas became extremely robust and almost entirely arboreal. They did this in part because they needed to be big to support the massive gut they need to ferment their plant food. This move towards robust herbivores has happened time and again in the evolution of the apes and even the hominids. It has also usually been a dead end because it stifles adaptability. Big jaws and big guts for digesting food limits the ability of the animal to hunt. Plant food is also very low in nutrients, particularly fats and so brain development is slowed. Gorillas can’t really revert to hunting because they are too big, slow and stupid for hunting in the jungle.
Chimps and humans adopted a more flexible approach, relying on high energy foods like fruits. This meant that they didn’t need big guts and massive molars. This left the option of hunting through the treetops open. When the jungle opened up into woodland the human branch simply followed the same pattern
Orangs evolve din an area with big ground predators, notably tigers. They never formed an terrestrial habit and they never really formed societies. Lacing those two things they were forced to remain in the traditional ape niche: arboreal frugivore/herbivore. The option of true hunting is just not available to a solitary arboreal ape.
Which is just rubbish. The fact that our closest chimpanzees eat meat regularly and have never been observed to us fire makes this argument spurious form the outset. Then we see a marked decrease in gut size in Australipothecus afraensis which suggest that they were also on a high meat diet. Again, these animals could not use fire.
By the time we get to H erectus we have an animal that is essentially a modern human from the ears down, including the teeth and gut. That combined with the tools they made shows us that they were accomplished carnivores form the minute they evolved. We can only conclude that the Australopithecine they evolved form was equally carnivorous since one does not make tools and then go out looking for a food source to use them on, And yet the first fires don’t show up until near then end of H erectus’ time.
Lets be honest here, the evidence all suggests that the common ancestor of humans and chimps ate meat, and that all members of the human line have done so since. There were some backsliders such as the robust Australopithecines that probably forsook active hunting, but they were the exception and their guts and jaws tell the tale quite clearly.