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
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.
And they didn’t eat those things except as flavourings for their meat, medicines, or emergency food when the hunt failed
No one ate much plant matter except for the week when local fruit fruited until they settled into villages around farms when agriculture reached western Europe 4000 years ago. My ancestors are from that region, grain intolerance is common in that population as we haven’t had it long. Cabbage is fine as we had that before we started farming it
Things are like that all over the world, people got agriculture 10kya (kiloyears ago) in Egypt through 200 years ago for the first contacted indigenous Australians, to not yet for some uncontacted tribes.
The less time since introduction of high dosage of plants and the poisons they carry on introduction of agriculture the less will those populations handle those plants. And none of us handle them as well as a herbivore. At best you use extra vitamins and iron to detoxify the plants you eat, at worst you’re intolerant.
The only food reliably available in snowy conditions is meat
The wild grains would have been very different from today’s, though, and the plants would have been too. Far less appetizing, I’d imagine. There is carbon/nitrogen isotope testing that shows that our distant predecessors also subsisted off roots and tubers.
I don’t have a point to make, just wondering out loud.
Yes, for most of them. Today’s carrots are very different from the original crops, as an easy example. Even the predominant colour wasn’t as such until a couple of centuries ago.
Can we agree that is at best very subjective to answer?
It doesn’t require much effort to find everyday food items that have changed wildly in its palatability over the course of one or two generations. Not processed foods; basic food items.
And we still do. Our ancestors got that right. Potatoes, kassava and taro are good examples of that.