To all meat dodgers:if early man had been a vegetarian....?!
To all meat dodgers:if early man had been a vegetarian....?
we would never have evolved to where we are now do you agree and if so does it make you feel silly for ever chastising meat eaters??
Answers:
to all free people : if early man had not had slavery ....? we would never have evolved to where we are now do you agree and if so does it make you feel silly for ever chasing slave owners ? yes or know ? ..think about the Egyptians and throughout worldwide history before you answer ..
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Now how ridiculous does that sound ? vegan forever .. .......................... to Andy B ..your total lack of nutritonal education and history is quite evident
Well, first of all, early man didn't own a factory farm where animals are kept in substandard conditions and fed hormones in order to grow faster and bigger, and antibiotics to ward off the diseases that fester there (if you were kept in a small pen with 4 or 5 of your buddies, wallowing in your own urine and feces, with no medical attention, along with thousands of others of you kind, your owner would have to do the same to you. Just look at how fast a cold can spread in your classroom.)
He only ate what he could hunt down and successfully kill. I'm not an archaeologist or whatever, but I'm SURE that he would have had to forrage and gather plants to eat during the winter, when animals were harder to hunt and he didn't own a REFRIGERATOR!!! Meat rots much faster than plants, you know.
anyway, I used to eat meat, so I don't chastise meat eaters. Educating, not chastising, is the way to create a better world.
What do you really know about eating habits of the "early man"? Why dont you read The China Study, to learn more about peoples eating habits and what that means for our health.
It makes you look silly when you're catching and dying in diseases that can be so easily avoided with a vegan diet. But ignorance is more convenient than a change of mind, eh?
Early man WAS a vegetarian. Early man had to learn to murder animals for food, but early mad also had to learn which plants could be eaten and couldn't be eaten.
Your question is without a valid basis, and is yet another attempt to taunt those of us who have risen above base instincts and chosen to eat wisely, healthfully, and low on the food chain, thus also helping to reduce all kinds of pollution and doing more than our part to green our lives, homes, countries and planet.
Consider yourself chastised yet again.
Hehe, "meat dodgers".
When you say evolution, do you mean a literal biological evolution, or a social one? Because if you mean the former, the way we would have "evolved to eat meat" would be if our former food supply had run out and the ability to digest meat was the difference between living to spread your genes and dying of starvation. In that case, your question basically states "If early man had not eaten meat, we would not be able to eat meat". If you're trying to say that eating meat gives you higher brain functions or something along those lines, first off, there have been no studies or evidence to suggest that, and second, evolution doesn't work that way. Changes to your body do not affect your children's genetics unless your DNA is somehow altered.
If you mean a social evolution, it's indeed possible that the want or need to kill animals at that point caused humans to develop hunting strategies or weaponry, which would require collective intelligence. This does not mean we must condone killing to accept the technology we have now. Even today, warfare and disease necessitates higher and higher technologal advances - but we don't have to love war and sickness. Or possibly you meant humans evolved socially because they had energy and mental stamina from eating meat which they didn't previously. If this is true, then the diet they had before was inadequate, and I don't blame them for doing what they needed to survive. Today, we have plentiful and nutritious vegetarian and vegan foods in affluent countries, so we can be fit and mentally alert without eating meat.
I don't chastise meat eaters, but if I did feel silly, it would be because mocking, guilting, or coercing a person into an action only angers them and makes them feel judged, which is not compassionate or an effective way to change one's mind.
There's a difference between survival and choice. Early "cave man" ate whatever they could get to eat, whatever was easiest. I'm not so certain all early man ate lots of meat all the time, though in some regions that is probably true, while early man living in dense areas of vegetation (fruit trees) would like eat more of those.
Today people choose to eat what they want. If you want to turn the clock back and live in a cave then that's your choice.
If you are saying that eating meat increased our brain size,there is another theory about how our brain increased in size.I don't see how eating meat would increase our brain size,people say that the excess protein from meat made our brains larger,but I don't think that is possible because excess protein just gets filtered thorugh our kidneys,it isn't used by the body.
"By choosing males with low T, females are prolonging the developmental and maturation rates of their male progeny. In humans the relative levels of testosterone (and probably estrogen) in males and females is the primary hormonal intermediary between the eight environmental cues and relative rates of maturation. By prolonging growth, whether explained by heterochronic concepts of neoteny (Montagu, 1956; Gould, 1977) (prolonging child features into adulthood) or by hypermorphosis (Shea, 1989; McKinney and McNamara, 1990) (prolonging all developmental stages), one of the net results is increased brain and cranium size. Prolonging growth rates is achieved in humans by lowering T. Accelerating growth, in effect condensing developmental stages, is achieved by raising T. We believe that there was a feedback loop effect speeding up the process of brain growth. This is similar to the process described by Miller (1994) using Fisher's (1930) runaway theory of sexual selection. It is our hypothesis that song and dance created peculiarities of human consciousness leading to culture, as opposed to evidencing them. Song and dance---in combination with females choosing males with lower T---are primary forces responsible for the exponential rise in brain size in the last 2 million years." ( Lehman A & Bernsten M (1999) Evolution and the Structure of Health and Disease
What? Since when was early man meat eater?
Meat eating only really came into popularity in the late 17th century, when it was a food that only the very rich could afford.
And then people started to get cancer and heart disease...at least the rich did... Cancer/Heart disease were classed as 'rich peoples diseases'
From the late 18th century, earlier 19th century more and more people started to eat meat, and alas cancer and heart disease became more common.
Early man also wouldn't own a factory farm with lots of torture and hormones pumped into the animals. So even for the small killings they might have had, they weren't enough to make us evolve.
How could eating death make you evolve?
Dead things in your mouth and evolution are different things
No sensible vegans can contest that we were deigned to eat meat. Even most vegan scientists agree that human's are designed to eat meat, that is not in question.
That we do not have claws, talons, or incisors to hunt proves nothing. When early hominids ate meat they scavenged it, as vultures do, using their fingers to get the sinews and meat other animals couldn't. It was only after that that they began to hunt the meat themselves, and only much later they began to cook it. It is interesting that even now if someone was brought up eating raw meat he would have no problem with it.
The last few million years of human evolution have revolved completely around tools. We used advanced stone tools long before we began to hunt our own meat, and as such there was no need for evolution to bestow us with large claws or teeth to kill prey.
Simple research into human biology reveals how we are meant to eat meat. For one thing, our body produces hydrochloric acid and meat splitting enzymes that herbivores don't produce and are solely used for the digestion of meat. There are adaptations to our teeth (not incisors, rather the size of the jaw), stomach and intestines which have made a human being very adept at meat digestion. There is nothing wrong with the way our body digests meat, and we are so adept at eating it no scientists are of any doubt we've evolved to eat it.
In contrast, there are many reasons we aren't naturally herbivores. We cannot naturally get all the nutrients we need without animal products naturally. Vitamin B12 cannot be got, even now, without animal products or supplements, and a lack of it can cause anaemia and impending death. 60% of vegans even now have some level of B12 deficiency, as opposed to no meat eaters, which says something about how well adapted we are to a vegan diet.
All other nutrients can be got naturally. That owes to that vegetables can now be sold all year round, even out of season, and can be flown into the country from all over the world. In bygone times people could only eat the relatively small range of plants that grew in their ecosystem, and only when they were in season. Thus many more nutrients would have been unavailable and still more unavailable for most of he year. Until very recently it would have been impossible for a vegan human to live naturally without dying very quickly.
@ CT, the winter was the very time people would be eating the most meat; y'know, when all the plants are dead, rather than in the spring and summer where there's loads of fruit and veg around.
@ Aladdin Sane
The reasons most carnivores (and quite a few herbivores) have huge teeth is as weapons, they don't help for actually eating mean, for which our teeth are just as good, albeit that they are also adapted for eating plants, unlike those of a carnivore.
@ Connie B
The tribes which turned into the early Western countries: France, England, Holland, the German states, etc, either didn't or had relatively little use of slaves, depending on time period. These are the countries to which our technology at the moment owed most, and apart from roads and bridges they got nothing from the Romans or any other of the big, slave using, empires.
Maybe people in the US can't really use this argument, what with their country being built on slaves and all that.
@ Blackbyrus
It is regarded as true by most scientists that without meat we couldn't have evolved our intelligence. Brains are hugely expensive organisms and account for about 20% of the energy we use. Without meat early man wouldn't have been able to get the energy needed to grown or sustain this size of brain.
Yes, unlike in previous ways we can survive on a veggie diet. It doesn't mean we need to, want to, or should, but I suppose that depends on opinion.
@ FM
Look at the primitive tribes living in Africa, S America, the Arctic circle and Asia, today. All of them eat meat, most of them at least reasonable amounts, some of them (Eskimos and Masai) eat no fruit/veg and a diet only consisting of animal products.
This speaks more about what our ancestors did than anything else.
@ Vegan and Proud
Whatever the cause for our increase in Brain size, and thus intelligence (although I rather think it was to do with those with larger Brain sizes and intelligence surviving more, and passing on their genes, as per Darwin) it wouldn't have been possible without meat, for the reason stated earlier.
@ Matticus
Where did you read that? Because I advise you never to believe anything from that source again, because it is so patently bollocks.
Early humans ate lots of meat (we can tell this by stone age men being found with hunting spears, mammoth bones, and cave paintings depicting hunting, not to mention the aforementioned primitive tribes which do show us a good deal about our past).
For those ancient civilisations which had writing, the Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, etc, we know they ate meat because their are written records of it.
We know people have kept animals for meat throughout history, even those of the very poor. When most people lived in the country, even the very poor could go and hunt, and all farms kept meat animals.
In the early industrial era, meat did become quite uncommon for the lower classes in cities and towns, due to expanding populations, rising food prices and increasing poverty, but even then it cannot be said meat was never eaten, even by some of the poorest.
Humans have always eaten meat, and anything that tells you otherwise can be positively shown to be a lie.