I know, I KNOW, we are omnivores (you, me, maybe not our llm friends, but most of us)… but that doesn’t quite line up with biological necessity.
I would argue we are facultative omnivores, but obligate carnivores. We can eat plants for efficiency (famines and whatnot), but they are not necessary for life. Meat, however, is necessary - at the very least we would have b vitamin deficiencies without meat, and babies wouldn’t develop into healthy humans without it.
People will argue, and i love you all for it, that maybe this applies historically but in the modern food environment we can engineer our way out of this obligation - sure, that’s true, but when speaking of our species appropriate and native diet - we would still be obligate carnivores
In evolutionary terms, I risk we can see it the other way around.
Our ancestors started as herbivores, being tree dwellers, and only later changed into the role of scavenger and after that predator, making the consumption of other animals a viable and reliable food source.
The species evolved into the role of the omnivore, capable of eating nearly anything to survive, and it proved to be a winning strategy.
If the concern is the apport of B12, eggs are a source for it and it would be an easy enough one for early humans to get it.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.
Where was I unclear in my point?
I think you’re saying that it’s easy to get B12 in the wild without meat, as if humans didn’t spend millions of years eating only meat when meat was available.
Not sure what I was missing in the earlier read
Most eggs are tiny, for example
What I am stating is that B12 can be obtained from other sources besides meat and that such sources - one of which is eggs - could be accessed by early humans.
The inclusion of meat in the diet of our ancestors has been demonstrated to be linked with the rapid increase of brain volume; meat is calorie and nutritionally dense, there is no denial of that.
But it is not something to overlook that humans descend from tree dwellers, which were most probably exclusive herbivores. For many more millions of years than meat, as a food stuff, has been part of the diet.
Thus, stating that humans are obligate carnivores makes no sense. Humans evolved to be omnivores, from herbivores.
Right. I think we kept some of the ability to detoxify some plants from the herbivorous apes we descended from, but then we spent millions of years scavenging (probably eating a lot of brains as we could smash skulls of lion kills open with a rock), then hunting, following migratory grass eaters
Plants became emergency food. We’re not as good at detoxifying them as a gorilla is
Hunter gatherers universally (outside the wet tropics where fruit is plentiful year around) eat meat when meat is available, and only use plants when the hunt fails
We classify animals as obligate carnivores when we see them in wild eating only meat. When we have found humans in the wild they eat only meat. If you study pre-agriculture bones you find they had a practically all meat diet.
Before agricultural and sedentary life became dominant, it is a well known fact humans were hunter-gatherers, with hunting providing the larger portion of their calories. Herbivores were plentiful and large; a single kill provided a good amount of food for a group for some time. Such a life style forced the following of herds.
Detoxify strikes me as an odd choice word. It’s been the quest, and a very successful one, for farmers since the taming of the first crops to selectively improve them to obtain better and safer results at each season. There is an honorable mention with cassava, which is inherently toxic due to the presence of cyanide in the tuber, but can nonetheless be safely consumed through careful preparation.
Cooking, through the original use of fire, enabled the species to make better use of all food. Cooking facilitates digestion and the absorbtion of nutrients. Nearly all of the food consumed on the planet is cooked; unless someone is eating their food completely raw, the concer with toxicity is very low and, in my understanding, irrelevant for what we have been discussing.
Note that there isn’t much to gather in Europe during the last glaciation of the current ice age, or even in winter in general
Which is prior to the rise of the first fixed settlements, from which agriculture started. During that period, humans survived off the land, hunting and gathering what they could. It is an established fact. Nonetheless, there have been findings supporting that prior to domestication, humans already gathered and consumed wild grains and other foods sourced from plants.
I am not a survival expert but I am aware there are food sources available throughout the entire year, for those who know it.
Frugivores, but yes… in the intervening couple million years we lost the ability to survive without meat, we adapted to our new food environment. Humans are clearly not frugivores anymore.
My point is we still need some meat to survive, we are obligated… so we are baseline obligate carnivores, and then opportunistic on other food sources. We can’t eat nearly anything, grass for instance - happily there are animals that can eat grass, which we can eat.
Eating eggs would be carnivorous behavior, no?
There are more non-fruit bearing than there are fruit bearing trees. It’s a safe assumption to consider early ancestors, prior to becoming land dwellers, had the largest portion of their diet based from leaves.
That’s a keen observation. Prior to shifting from herbivores to scavengers, the apport of B12 would probably be obtained from specialized intestinal biome. Since evolution always comes with trade-offs, that was a loss in the long term.
I refuse the insistence with humans being obligate carnivores. Prior to becoming active predators, humans widened and improved their diet by including what they could scavenge from the landscape, including meat sourced from dead animals or abandoned predator kills. That is actively developing and evolving into omnivorous capabilty.
Eggs are not meat. Eggs are an animal product, granted, but it’s not from its consumption we derive the notion of being carnivore.
That is quite the assumption, modern frugivore apes only eat leaves when fruit is scarce
Fair enough, i’m open to better terminology. Must eat some meat needs a term that isn’t overloaded.
Eggs are not carnivorous food?
I had to go read up a bit on the ancestors of the apes and I admit I have to agree on that. But given today’s extant species of apes have diverse diets in between them, with gorillas being considered mostly herbivore, the same can be at least considered for ancestor species.
I agree but I’m not the one to offer such word. Unless, as a species, we were able to develop some sort of intrinsic mechanism to obtain the vital B12, we are bound by our biology to source it out. But even in our shortcoming, we have a smart mechanism: we can store the vitamin in our liver. In my understanding, that hints at a time where the molecule was a very scarce resource.
It a contentious point of view, but nothing has to die in order for me to subsist when eating eggs. In a more wild setting this is much more debateable, I’ll concede.
Modern apes are still frugivores, about 20% of their diet comes from fermenting leaves, but its not a significant percentage.
I see your moral stance, but in biology carnivore is a term of art describing the source of dietary inputs it has no moral component. Humans are mono-gastrics, but not a hind-gut fermenter, the bulk of our nutrition by our but biology is going to be meat or fruit, and we can’t live on fruit alone.
I specifically mentioned gorillas as the species is classified as predominantly herbivore, with fruits making up a very small percentage of their diet.
If an extant species has this specific diet, it is at least plausible to conceive that ancestor species had it as well.
That would be the case if the species was intaking food raw, which is not the case. Cooking of food facilitates the access to nutrients in it, both for vegetable and animal source.
Fair point, i hadn’t realized.
Cooking seems to be orthogonal to the discussion of species classification. People are feeding cats synthetic plant based diets now, but we still classify cats as obligate carnivores based on their natural diet in their natural environment.
I agree with your point but it is moot for current day. To a degree, there is a case to be made about reviewing how we classify humans as a species. Human beings have long exceeded the biological limitations imposed by evolution.
That is surprising by a good number of reasons. Thankfully, we’ve learned how to synthesize taurine but regardless I can’t fathom how the critters can absorb protein and other nutrients from plant matter.
Hurray for science, I say.