I will admit it is a theory. But, a theory that makes a lot of sense! All I am really saying (and anyone please tell me how this can be refuted) is if given the choice between hunting/eating animals or eating vegetation, any species will choose animals, simply because of the laws of survival (more energy with less energy used to get it). Once we had the skills and the tools, and providing there was adequate game, we would have chosen to eat ONLY animals. Now, if anyone disagrees with this they need to take a course in logic! So, all I am saying is ONLY if there was no game would we have been forced to eat anything other than animals. Also, it is a FACT that animals provide superior nutrition AND more energy (more "bang for the buck") than any other source of food. Like I said, just ask a cat (or any animal at the top of the food chain) if they would prefer anything other than other animals. So, enough with this nonsense about how the WAPF found certain blah, blah, blah. If you want to argue whether during our evolution there was times when humans couldn't find game, fine. I don't think that was the case, though. I think it was the game (our food supply) that was the biggest factor in controlling our population size (that and other factors like diseases, accidents, etc... but, the food supply was the most critical, as it always is in nature). Again, once we had big enough brains to start society up and take in those cats, we changed our ways. Wheat attracts mice, what can I say! Hey, blame it on the cats! It's their design!

Do you know why (probably) most of the human dung found contains plant material? Because when you eat fat and protien, it gets completely digested by the stomach and goes to the small intestine - it never makes it to the large intestine to become dung. I know this from personal experience. Look at all the "constipated" threads - everyone has a hard time understanding why nothing is coming out their backsides.

There is, Nancy, there is! It's us!

Sorry - it's been a while I learned about all that in 7th grade

Okay, theBear said:



Then Dodger asked:



And theBear said:



Then I asked:





Then I asked the really tough question:



Maybe we're BOTH on ignore, Dodge?

Let's see what science actually knows:

(bottom line: a) there was no single typical diet b) we know too little)


1. Smil, V. 2002. Eating meat: evolution, patterns, and consequences. Population and Development Review 28:599-639

Evolutionary heritage and preagricultural meat consumption

Evidence for hominid and early human omnivory is rich and indisputable
(Kiple 2000; Larsen 2000; Wing 2000; Stanford and Bunn 2001). No forag-
ing society, especially not those in environments subject to pronounced sea-
sonal fluctuations of biomass production, could afford to ignore animal foods.
Archeological excavations suggest that meat eating was on the rise some
1.5 million years ago, but because of the unimpressive physical endowment
of early humans (smaller and less muscled than modern adults) and the
absence of effective weapons, it is almost certain that our earliest ancestors
were much better scavengers than hunters (Blumenschine and Cavallo
1992). Large predators of their African homeland (above all lions and leop-
ards) often left behind partially eaten herbivore carcasses, and this meat, or
at least the nutritious bone marrow, could be reached by alert and enter-
prising early humans before it was claimed by vultures and hyenas.
The foraging and scavenging habits of early hominids had to be very
similar to the food acquisition of their primate ancestors (Whiten and
Widdowson 1991)—and we now know beyond any doubt that hunting for
meat has an important place, both nutritionally and socially, in the lives of
both chimpanzee species (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus), and hence also
in the evolution of Pliocene hominids (Stanford 1996, 1998, 1999). Aver-
age consumption of meat among the studied chimpanzee groups, which
hunt mostly colobus monkeys and a few other, smaller species, is between
4 and 11 kg a year per capita. In proportion to body mass most early hu-
man societies consumed at least that much and many ate a lot more. Exca-
vated evidence demonstrates that meat scavenged from the kills by large
carnivores began to be augmented by deliberate hunting perhaps as early
as 700,000 years ago. We will never be able to reconstruct reliably all those
diverse and changing patterns of pre-Paleolithic nutrition, but the much
more abundant Paleolithic record leaves no doubt about the extent and in-
tensity of hunting in some environments.
Controlled use of fire—perhaps as early as nearly half a million years
ago, but for certain about 250,000 years ago (Goudsblom 1992)—enlarged
the meat-eating opportunities as it increased food intakes. Meat was made
more palatable through searing and roasting, and smoking preserved it for
later consumption. Moreover, the increased food-energy availability achieved
by cooking previously unpalatable plant materials made it possible to en-
gage more frequently in risky hunting (Wrangham et al. 1999). Every ani-
mal, from armadillos to zebras, was hunted but, as already noted, mega-
herbivores were always preferred. This more risky, indeed often fatal, choice
has obvious energetic explanations.
While all wild meat is an excellent source of protein, nearly all smaller
species contain very little fat and hence have very low energy density: mon-
keys, hares, rabbits, and small deer have only 1,200–1,500 kcal/kg, or only
30–40 percent of the average energy density of grains, and less than 5 per-
cent fat.
In addition, small animals are often quite elusive: rodents live un-
derground, lagomorphs are superb runners, most small mammals in the
tropical rain forest are arboreal or nocturnal (or both). Consequently, hunt-
ing of small mammals may have returned as little as two to three times as
much energy as invested in the pursuit, and in many hunts there was no
net energy gain.
In contrast, megaherbivores do not have just a larger body mass, they
also contain much more fat and hence their energy density may be more
than twice as high as that of small species. A single mammoth thus pro-
vided as much edible energy as 100 large deer, and a small bison was easily
equal to more than 200 rabbits. Group hunting of these animals yielded
30–50 times as much energy as was invested in their killing (only near-
shore whaling was more rewarding, with the carcass yielding as much as
2,000 times the energy spent in the hunt). Moreover, these megaherbivores
could be killed without weapons by well-planned and skillfully executed
stampeding over cliffs to provide large caches of meat (Frison 1987). Such
Upper Paleolithic sites as the French Solutré (with its remains of more than
100,000 horses) and the Moravian Pr˘edmostí (Howell 1966) make it clear
that some preagricultural diets derived as much as 80 percent of all food
energy, and an even larger share of protein, from meat.
Still, it seems improbable that hunting of large herbivores by small
populations of Ice Age foragers could have been so intense as to bring about
the relatively rapid and continent-wide disappearance of most large grazing
animals from preagricultural landscapes. But Alroy’s (2001) ecologically re-
alistic simulation of the end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinction in North
America demonstrates that even a low population growth rate and a low
hunting intensity would have made anthropogenic extinction of mega-
herbivores inevitable, and his model correctly predicts the terminal fate of
32 out of 41 megafaunal Ice Age species.
But carnivorousness has done more than provide a high-quality sub-
stitute for plant foods. Stanford (1999) concluded, on the basis of his re-
search on chimpanzees, that the origins of human intelligence are linked to
meat, not because of its nutritional qualities but because of the cognitive
abilities that were needed for the strategic sharing of the meat within the
group: the intellect needed for strategic sharing of meat was one of the fac-
tors behind the expansion of the human brain. And another theory posits
that human carnivorousness that progressed far beyond the opportunistic
hunting or capture of smaller animals may have directly energized the pro-
cess of encephalization. The average human encephalization quotient (ac-
tual/expected brain mass for body weight) is slightly over 6, compared to
values between 2.0 and 3.5 for hominids and primates (Foley and Lee 1991).
The expensive-tissue hypothesis and considerations of practical satis-
faction of daily protein requirements make it clear that the relatively high
dependence on meat was a matter of physiological necessity. The hypoth-
esis was devised to explain the fact that although human brains are much
larger than primate brains—at about 350 g the neonate brain is twice as
large as that of a newborn chimpanzee, and by the age of five it becomes
more than three times as massive as the brain of the closest primate species
(Foley and Lee 1991)—we do not have more metabolically expensive tis-
sues (i.e., internal organs and muscles) than would be expected for a pri-
mate of our size. This discrepancy led Aiello and Wheeler (1995) to argue
that the only way to support larger brains without raising the overall meta-
bolic rate was to reduce the size of another major metabolic organ. With
relatively little room left to reduce the mass of liver, heart, and kidneys, the
gastrointestinal tract is the only metabolically expensive tissue whose size
can vary substantially depending on the dominant diet.
Obligatory herbivores subsisting on phytomass that combines low en-
ergy density with poor digestibility require relatively large gastrointestinal
tracts to process large amounts of feed. Voluminous and elaborated ferment-
ing chambers of folivorous ruminants are well known,
but the extreme
examples are koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus), marsupials whose adults weigh
as little as 6–8 kg but eat up to 1.5 kg of leaves a day and digest them for as
long as several days in their extraordinarily long (1.8–2.5 m) intestines. Even
so, this poor nutrition allows them to be on the move only about 1 percent
of the time (Leach 2002). Consequently, a fructivorous primate of human
size would have to eat 3–5 kg of sweet fruits and a folivorous one more
than 10 kg of leaves a day, and even then this bulky plant diet would cover
no more than about half of the essential protein requirements (Southgate
1991) and would leave little room for vigorous activity.
Obligatory carnivores subsisting largely on easily digestible protein can
dispense with cumbersome metabolic arrangements and devote a great deal
of energy to rapid pursuits (felids) or to persistent running (canids). Evolu-
tion had clearly shifted human capabilities in that direction. The human
gastrointestinal tract is about 40 percent smaller than it would be in a simi-
larly sized primate, and the most obvious explanation is that the reduction
resulted from progessively larger inclusion of foodstuffs of higher energy
density and easier digestibility. In those environments where nuts and seeds,
which also have relatively high protein content, were readily available,
preagricultural foragers could obtain adequate diets by remaining over-
whelmingly vegetarian. But where the energy-dense seeds were absent (in
tundras), scarce, or difficult to reach (in arid grasslands or in high canopies
of boreal forests), animal foods supplied large shares of overall food needs.
Another meat-related development of major evolutionary importance
was the domestication of many animal species that began about 11,000 years
ago with sheep and goats and then progressed to cattle, pigs, horses, and
camels (Alvard and Kuznar 2001). These carefully husbanded deferred har-
vests of high-quality foodstuffs constituted a valuable resource that acted as
a buffer against failures of field crops, but their management required a
great deal of strategizing, planning, cooperation, and sudden problem-solv-
ing, qualities that are uniquely human.
There is obviously no representative pattern of preagricultural diet, but
when the average meat intakes of chimpanzees are prorated to more massive
humans they indicate expected consumption of about 6–17 kg a year per
capita. There would thus seem to be a good evolutionary argument for the
annual presence of at least 10–20 kg of meat in average diets in environ-
ments where a wide variety of other high-quality foodstuffs were always avail-
able. Conversely, the evolutionary evidence makes it clear that there are no
adverse health effects in deriving, as did the traditional Inuit, more than 90
percent of all dietary energy and virtually 100 percent of food protein from
fat and meat of aquatic mammals in environments lacking a variety of good
plant foods and in populations whose active life requires high energy inputs.
Extremes of daily intakes of animal protein among the remaining for-
aging populations that were studied by modern methods after 1950 con-
firm the wide range of per capita meat, and hence protein, intakes. Healthy
and active adults require daily about 60 g of good-quality protein, but more
than 300 g of protein were available to Alaskan Inuit feeding on whales,
seals, fish, and caribou, while the foragers in arid African environments,
subsisting mainly on nuts and tubers, had at their disposal often less than
20 g of protein per day (Smil 1994).

------------------------------------------------

2. Craig B Stanford, Henry T Bunn, 1999. Meat eating and hominid evolution
Current Anthropology; Chi. 40(5):726-728
Abstract:
The role of hunting and scavenging in human evolution has been a subject of intense
anthropological interest for decades and has produced some of the most widely discussed and
debated research findings and interpretations in the history of the discipline. Stanford et al
discuss some of topics discussed at a recent conference on the subject, including how the
pattern of meat eating in modern people compared with early humans.

Full Text:
Copyright University of Chicago, acting through its Press Dec 1999

Meat Eating and Hominid Evolution1

The role of hunting and scavenging in human evolution has been a subject of intense
anthropological interest for decades and has produced some of the most widely discussed and
debated research findings and interpretations in the history of the discipline. In spite of the
central place assigned to studies of meat eating, scholars from the different subfields of
biological anthropology rarely find themselves in the same room at traditional conference
venues, and therefore research data from one subfield rarely penetrate the others, To remedy
this and to discuss recent findings, a conference, "The Early Human Diet: The Role of Meat,"
was held October 2-5, 1998, on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The
conference was sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research
and was organized by Craig B. Stanford (University of Southern California) and Henry T.
Bunn (University of Wisconsin, Madison. The 18 participants were paleoanthropologists,
primatologists, archaeologists, and students of foragers and of carnivores, including some
researchers whose fieldwork and expertise overlapped two or more of these specialities'. They
had been chosen for their intersecting research on the role of meat in the early human diet and
had been asked a year before the meeting to prepare papers focusing on one of the following
topics related to this theme:

1. How is hominid behavior distinguished from natural processes in the fossil record? How is
hunting distinguished from scavenging in the fossil record?

2. What are the major costs and benefits of hunting for living animals versus scavenging for
carcass meat?

3. How do hunters hunt? What is the role of cooperation and communication during the hunt
for both human and nonhuman animal hunters?

4. What are the costs and benefits associated with meat eating compared with relying on an
herbivore's diet?

5. What is the nature of the variation cross-culturally in the nutritional importance of meat to
modern foraging people? When and why does meat represent more than just a source of
nutrition for modem foraging people?

6. What is unique about the pattern of meat eating in modem people compared with great
apes?

7. What is unique about the pattern of meat eating in modem people compared with early
humans?

8. What was the role of meat eating in the geographic radiation of the genus Homo?

9. What aspects of meat eating and foraging for meat may have influenced the evolution of
human intelligence?

10. What is the nature of meat sharing among modern primates and human foragers, and what
are the implications for early human sharing patterns?

The role that meat played in hominid origins was the central topic. How much was eaten at
different evolutionary stages, how habitat affected meat eating, how meat was procured and
how it was distributed, and how its archaeological signatures in the fossil record are recognized
were all topics of discussion. Although a revisiting of the Man the Hunter paradigm of the 19
6os (Washburn and Lancaster 1968) was not a goal of the conference, much discussion
inevitably focused on the importance of meat in human evolution, both through hunting and
scavenging and through meat-sharing behavior. it was clear that modem reframings of both the
Man the Hunter model and Glynn Isaac's food-sharing model (Isaac 1978) continue to be
highly influential in the subfields of biological anthropology that address meat eating in hominid
evolution.

PALEOANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES

The only direct evidence of the behavior of our Plio/ Pleistocene ancestors is their fossilized
remains. Paleoanthropological approaches to meat eating in human ancestry have historically
involved the study of the bones of hominids, which tell us very little about carnivory, and the
bone assemblages of associated potential prey species, which may tell us much.
Archaeological approaches use stone tool evidence to build an empirically based picture of
early hominid behavioral ecology which, together with data on paleoenvironment, can provide
a perspective on the place of both living prey and scavenged carcasses in the early diet.

The role of scavenging versus hunting, a long-standing debate among human-evolutionary
scholars, was not a topic of intense discussion at the conference. Participants agreed that the
traditional either-or dichotomy between these two foraging modes is not a valid one and that
paleoanthropologists have moved on to studying the degree of scavenging or hunting on a
species-by-species or population-by-population basis. Stiner, for instance, argued that
Paleolithic Homo sapiens in Eurasia were both hunters and scavengers and that unequivocal
evidence for hunting in Europe first appears with archaic H. sapiens 250,000 years ago. Speth
presented information on Neandertal settlement and meat-eating patterns at Kebara Cave,
Israel, and questioned whether Neandertal use of space and hunting behavior differed
qualitatively from those of anatomically modern H. sapiens. Tappen addressed the monolithic
use of a Serengeti model for the evolutionary ecology of early Homo in the Pliocene; her data
from other, wetter sites indicate that scavenging has been overemphasized in reconstructions of
early hominid foraging ecology. Pickering presented a discussion of taphonomic issues
affecting early hominid meat-eating evidence and reexamined the Swartkrans hominid material.
He argued that large carnivores accounted for hominid representation at Swartkrans through
regurgitation and defecation rather than by active transport. Ancillary experimental studies of
captive carnivore consumption of primates were also discussed. Rick described a Holocene
high-altitude human hunting population that harvested vicufias. The local abundance of these
animals created an unusual situation of a lowrisk hunting strategy while providing
archaeological signatures useful for comparison with other, less abundant assemblages.

These diverse case studies were placed in perspective by the remaining papers that had a
paleoanthropological focus. Sept placed meat eating in dietary perspective by discussing the
other, more frequently consumed items in the early hominid diet, plants. While our ability to
model the entire dietary paleolandscape is still quite limited, Sept creatively estimated how a
Pliocene riparian forest habitat might have fed an australopithecine relative to a member of
early Homo. Foley showed that there may have been a major evolutionary/ecological shift that
corresponded to an increase of meat in the diet with the appearance of H. ergaster. Finally,
Walker presented a theoretical model for the recent increase in hominid brain size based on
dietary quality (a theme returned to by many participants) and linked the ability of genus
Homo, in particular H. erectus, to produce a large-bodied, large-brained neonate to
increasingly effective meat procurement by hunting.

LIVING NONHUMAN ANALOGUES

Although the fossils provide the only direct evidence for hominization, without living analogues
our ability to reconstruct hominid behavioral ecology would be severely limited. Such
reconstructions must be done cautiously and must bear in mind that modern apes are probably
quite different from their Pliocene ancestors just as we are from our own. But using primate
models provides a range of behavioral and ecological adaptations likely to have been present
in the last common ancestor before the pongid-hominid divergence. Van Valkenburgh used the
community ecology of living carnivores to investigate the ecological relationship between early
Homo and the large carnivores with which it was sympatric. She argued that since extant
carnivores prey heavily on other carnivore species in apparent interspecific competition, early
hominids would have faced a severe predation threat from their sympatric carnivores, which
would have viewed them as food competitors as well as prey. McGrew contributed data and
perspectives on the use of invertebrates by early hominids based on the harvesting and
consumption of a variety of insects by modern chimpanzees. He suggests that regular use of
this overlooked food source can rival mammal-meat consumption in nutritional importance.

Stanford and Rose presented comparisons of chimpanzee hunting and meat eating with those
of a related primate. Rose described her work with capuchin monkeys (Cebus albifrons),
which are voracious predators of small mammals and show some striking parallels with
chimpanzees and also major differences (lack of active sharing). Stanford compared the
meat-foraging ecology of chimpanzees with that of some modern foraging people and argued
that searching for meat as opposed to eating it opportunistically during plant food foraging was
likely to have begun only after the advent of efficient bipedal locomotion.

Milton and Schoeninger tackled the reconstruction of the early hominid diet on the basis of
those of modern higher primates. Milton argued that hominids overcame the constraints of
relatively inefficient digestive apparatuses among the hominoids by turning to meat in increasing
amounts. Schoeninger compared the diets of modern apes with that of some modern foragers
and argued that hominids were able to extract greater nutrition from their environments through
enhanced food processing, aided later by the use of tools.

FORAGER BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY

Although the use of modern foraging people as analogues for earlier forms of humans has
come under much attack in recent years, the fact remains that tropical and subtropical people
living off the land with traditional technologies provide the best available windows onto the
dietary behavior of early hominids in similar habitats. The study of hunter-gatherers can also
inform us about meat-eating signatures in the archaeological record, as evidenced by Bunn's
paper on Hadza meat eating and the study of cutmarks. He showed that by I - 75 million years
ago early Homo was acquiring carcasses of ungulates by both hunting and power scavenging,
butchering the carcasses selectively and transporting them to favored central locations for
consumption. Hawkes also used the Hadza to understand the meaning of the carcass
ownership in order to infer patterns and purposes of the distribution of meat by foragers. She
brought chimpanzee meat sharing into the equation as well to contrast and compare patterns of
ownership and strategic use of the carcass by the two species. Alvard [who was unable to
attend) described a model for the origin of human cooperative hunting and reviewed the
literature on cooperation among foragers. Winterhalder presented a review of intragroup
resource transfer among social animals, pointing to the diversity of patterns observed and
arguing that complex forms of meat sharing likely characterized hominids at all stages of human
evolution.

theBear,

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Wa'il

Dude, I'm with you!

Just as a reward to a very good year, I'm going to celebrate by going without veggies for an entire year!

356 days of culinary heaven baby!

Well, from reading this, it seems there was lots of meat/fat eating going on. Lots of "bang for the buck" activity. Yah, we don't know a lot, so are left to lots of theories. And I think the best theory so far is that cats are behind this whole mess!

I tried the all meat diet for a few days and didn't like it. Too much will power. Life is too short to deny myself the wonderful taste of fresh fruit and piles of steamed buttered veges and crunchy roasted almonds and an occasional dark chocolate. I think I agree more with Neanderthin. Early man would have eaten a variety of things and would certainly never have used his will power to avoid an apple tree or a pear tree. He probably fell asleep under it with a full belly. Sorry Bear, your way is too spartan, I want to enjoy life a little more.

Nor would they have had any concept of 'nutrition' as we think of it. I'm pretty sure that if they discovered that something tasted good and didn't hurt them, they ate it.

So if we didn't EAT it, how did it get in our stools?

I just want to say that I am highly amused The Bear chose an omnivore as his user name.

Great thread.

Or at least, if they did nutrition was defined as not starving.

But you are referring to the stools of "hunter-gatherers" that came AFTER "hunters".

I think it is possible that we would have focused our energy on hunting game if it was available... and I think it was available for a long time. Only after the game began to get scarce did we resort to gathering as well. You have to remember that apples back in those days were about as sweet as the leaves on the same tree. How many times have YOU picked leaves off of a tree and eaten them? I am only saying that eventually we HAD to start eating everything we could to survive... then, we became "hunter-gatherers" and vegetation started showing up in our stools.

I don't know how many times I need to repeat this "theory"... and it is only a theory, just as your statements are only theories. And, if one adopts this theory, they still have to figure out WHEN we made the transition (different in different parts of the planet for sure). If it was real recent, then Bear is correct, and we have not been able to adapt. BUT, if it was much longer ago, then Bear is wrong and we have had time to adapt to SOME carbs in our diet. I agree that excess insulin is VERY damaging to our bodies. Just how much we can handle is up for debate. HUGE surges produced by eating straight sugar (from processed food) is ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE as most of us will agree.

In "Life Without Bread" they point out that northern Europeans went through a recent ice age, and that they have only been eating non-animal food for the past 2000 years. I don't think that is enough time to properly adapt to this food. In other parts of the world, as the book does point out, there was longer time to adapt. The book does say we are in a transition to a new diet, but it makes clear that a lot of us cannot handle this new diet at this time.

TIME is the critical factor here. How much time have we been eating carbs, and how much time is it going to take to adapt? Although some would say we have been eating carbs all along. Some think we can eat no animal products (vegans) and be the healthiest. I don't have ANY answers (as Bear seems to think he does), but just find the possibilities intriguing.

And, I still think my cat theory deserves some serious consideration!

I too seem to be experiencing more and more of an intolerance to fruits and veggies. How refreshing. I keep hearing that I must eat veggies, yet they leave me starving and hungry, and go right through me (sorry for the bad visual, lol).
--Elizabeth

I have to agree that if it becomes too difficult to eat like "theBear", then it is probably better (if only for your mental health) to eat non-animal foods. Which ones is what most people struggle with. The thing is, if one knows that they don't really NEED non-animal food, then they will only eat the ones they like, instead of forcing down veggies they hate (which I think a lot of us have done, just to "get all those good nutrients"). To me, that is the real theme of this thread (and most likely it's lure)... whether we really need non-animal food, or if it is truly optional.

So, with that logic, since taste is totally acquired, they would have eaten all grass, leaves, bugs, sticks, dirt, everything in the environment. Which, possibly they did... but, I still say it was only once the "good stuff" (the animals) got scarce. And, when I say "good stuff" I mean bang for the buck energy... far bigger concern to survival than "taste"! Right? Or are we still trying to justify eating chocolate cake?... since that is certainly in our present environment!

When you say "discovered that something... didn't hurt them", you must remember that it WILL hurt them if they get less energy from what they foraged than the energy it took them to forage it... they will die off in a hurry! I think that qualifies as "hurt them".

Actually, from my POV this is more of an argument in favor of eating more than just meat; I doubt that any intelligent being would pass up edible food in favor of that which still must be hunted and killed (a tart but edible berry in the hand vs. two birds still alive, kicking and fleeing from you in the bush, if you will) and would likely have eaten both. I don't believe that our paleo ancestors were stupid or foolish. Food = survival. Easy food = greater chance at survival and less chance of going hungry. I also think that you are assuming that our paleo ancestors had absolutely no sense of curiosity so that having witnessed another animal eat berries, grasses, tubers or seeds they would not have wondered to themselves, "I wonder what that tastes like or if it's good for food?"



Well...if it was a choice between cake and starve, guess what I'd be eating? Besides, I don't know about your environment, but there isn't any chocolate cake in my immediate vicinity at the moment so if I wanted some, I'd have to go hunt for it. Having said that, I thought we were discussing what paleo peoples ate and I don't believe that scientists have found any fossilized chocolate cake remains or cake residue in petrified poop to date.
Another angle that I haven't seen considered yet is that none of us are living in the same environments (ie relatively pristine and unpolluted) as paleo people and so their biological oxidative stress would have been considerably lower than what we experience so eating the same diet while not living in the same environment may not necessarily equal the same results. So, even though my plan only allows me 30 grams of carb per day, I attempt to choose those highest in antioxidants to counteract that oxidative (free-radical generating) stress as best I can. Think of it as an insurance policy of sorts (something that our paleo ancestors also didn't have ).

Taste is totally acquired? If that is the case, why can't some people seem to acquire the taste for veggies? Why does everyone, nearly univerally, crave sweets?

What makes you think they couldn't get energy out of a piece of fruit? We're very, very good at getting energy from carbs. So good in fact, that too many of them and we get fat. Voila, stored energy. Its a heck of a lot harder to store energy from protein and animal fats. Its almost impossible to eat enough of it to do that. Of course, in your version of Paleo-times, it rained meat every day from 2-4 in the afternoon so no one every had to miss a meal.

I've no doubt the vegetarians grasped at this as some sort of proof that vegetables are necessary in the diet, but the fact remains that ruminent upper GI contents are a good source of energy and nutrients - good enough to support an animal weighing over a thousand pounds!

Consider the fact that the purpose of digestion is to extract nutrients from food, and in order to do that, the food may need to go through considerable processing to make those nutrients available, and - especially in ruminents - to convert raw fibrous vegetable matter into something that is actually useful to the organism, namely fats and proteins. Recognizing this fact is hardly advocating for vegetarianism, since the only practical way for our H-G ancestors to get this material was to kill an animal that produces it. I further speculate that paleo people discovered that the GI contents could also be used to help preserve (pickle) meat, indeed this would have naturally happened if they used the stomach and gut to contain meat butchered off the carcass. Voila... the invention of sausage!

Possibly few modern Inuit would. What about pre-modernized Inuit and other H-G cultures?The few times I've managed to catch my dogs in the act, the contents of the abdominal cavity were consumed first. We also occasionally feed our dogs lacto-fermented vegetables (they actually have their own pickle-jar on the counter) and it doesn't matter if we feed it with liver, eggs or anything, they go for the pickle first. Again, not advocating for vegetarianism, but speculating that carnivores may have an evolutionary reason for liking fermented condiments and vegetables dressed in short chain fatty acids.

Wyv

I LOVE veggies. However my POV is that they are not necessary to sustain ones health. I really could not give a flying leap about what our ancestors ate though I am finding this discussion enlightening. I just know what works for me, keeps my blood glucose happy, my moods stable (and that makes DH and my 4 kids plus the 13 I teach happy) and my weight down. I can not argue with those results. I am impressed with the knowledge here though and will continue to read and follow it close...

Considering that they eat mostly marine animals who also eat other marine animals, wouldn't that be a bit redundant anyway?

Hunting and killing a very large herbivore (or several large herbivores, by running many of them off a cliff in organized hunts - which is how it was often done... hmmm, I guess it was "raining meat everyday"), is MUCH more "bang for the buck energy" (there's that stupid phrase again! ) than picking berries! NOW (and I wish I did NOT have to keep repeating this), when game got scarce, YES, we became opportunists. Trust me, if you were out in the wild starving, you would resort to eating dirt and sand if it was all there was! (and wishing like hell you had some chocolate cake!) BUT, what if there was plenty of game? (especially from 2-4 every afternoon!). THEN WHY would anyone eat anything else? After eating all that animal fat, they would be so satiated, I am sure they would have passed up any and all chocolate cake in the vicinity! Except on Thanksgiving... I think they would have indulged in some kinda treat! But, that only came around once a year!


BTW... I still favor my cat theory above all others!

I second that! I think they have been overrated to no end! So, if we don't need them for health, why eat them if we don't even like them?

I may just go back to my meat and donut diet that I was on a couple years ago! That was "choosing my carbs" wisely!

And I may just go back to my meat and wine diet, my all-time favorite!!! I like this thread more and more!!!

Duparc, Did you miss the part where he said he's been on the diet for 47 years?

Apparently so.