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 can’t find the article again but as I was thinking about it, I found a broader way to approach this entire subject.
The Aborigenal People of Australia should make the perfect defense of the obligate carnivore yet it doesn’t.
If humans were the obligate carnivores that is being proposed, not omnivores that evolved from herbivores, the conditions upon arrival to the australian continent would have been close to ideal to lock in that flesh based diet, with plants used solely for medicinal and flavouring purposes. A use, that by itself would be odd, but that is a tangent subject.
Instead, the human population, minute to the available colossal land mass, practically devoid of competing predators, with plenty of prey animals, which upon arrival included herbivore megafauna, actively explored the landscape to discover vegetable food sources, to the point of developing practices to preserve and increase the frequency of such food sources on specific locations.
(I’m making a conscious effort to avoid the use of the word “agriculture” and others related here because it appears that experts, regardless evidences indicating that the Aborigenal Peoples, prior to the arrival of europeans to the continent, developed, cared and tended areas of land to renewable food sources, resist to recognize those efforts as agricultural.
I find that position as contentious, to say the least.)
It is undeniable that human beings require apport from extrinsic sources of vital nutrients, specifically the vitamin B12; that is beyond contention. To state human beings are obligate carnivores because of such requirement is abusing the notion, as human beings are capable to sustain life, in a healthy fashion, with minute imputs of flesh of other animals. A true obligate carnivore would not be able to do so.
Okay my well educate foreigner, what was the Australian population on what they call invasion day?
And what did the men who returned an English refugee from a convict settlement want instead of bread?
I do not know. Please care to further my education.
We believe the population was in the low millions. The men ate wichity grubs extracted from an acacia tree nearby.
The men being aboriginal, I’d say I’m not surprised.
The population was small for the available land mass, then. What is the point to carry from that?
Millions is pretty big numbers for a stone age population in an arid country like this.