What was the original diet for humans and why? Plant based or Paleo?!
Answers:
If you are referring to "Homo sapiens", their diet has always included meat. It was the various hominid, species which included Toumai Sahelanthropus tchadensis - Kenyanthropus platyops, to Ardipithecus ramidus to the various Gracile Australopithecines (Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus anamensis, Australopithecus garhi) to Robust Australopithicines/Paranthropus (Australopithecus aethiopicus, Australopithecus boisei, Australopithecus robustu) and finally to Homo genus (Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo ergaster Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis)
Hominid species are not really human but the species from where humans evolved.
It is theorized that "toumai" was a "vegetarian but the succeeding species evolved into meat eating that by the time modern humans, homo sapiens came along, they were already omnivores. Keep in mind that "modern" is used in comparison to the earlier species and that it actually refers to thousands of years ago. Soem scientists object to the notion that humans "evolved" into being omnivores by pointing out that the homo sapiens species were already meat eaters fro the very beginning.
Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, are not vegan. In fact, they actively hunt for meat which includes anything from termites to small birds and mammals to primates. They are also known to practice cannibalism killing and eating other chimps.
You'll have to come up with a specific time we became "human." Our primitive ancestors always scavenged meat when they could. If they found a dead carcass and were able to pick meat off it, they did. Bone marrow was good stuff. Of course, they were in competition with other animals for that meat, too.
It's really not until we started making tools that scientists are able to point to bones and say "humans killed this animal" and that's a lot further along in our evolution.
plant. It was easier to catch (haha science joke). Even though the bow and arrow were invented in the paleolithic age, plant is the original because animals were very hard to kill with the primative weapons, and plants were abundant in the warm climate the oldest remains are found in.
I think for the most part out distant ancestors were opportunists and scavengers. They ate pretty much anything they could get ahold of. This included plants, roots, nuts, fruits, eggs, shellfish, and dead animals.
If you believe the Bible, vegans. Otherwise, it depends on how far back you wanna go. Our closest relatives are mostly vegan, though they eat bugs for about 3% of their diet.
What sounds easier: foraging for nuts and berries or tackling a mammoth?
The earliest Hominins were primarily vegetarian but may have eaten some meats occasionally. Since they lacked claws or teeth which were capable of tearing through animal hides and breaking bones etc, the only meats they could have eaten were from carcasses they found. So their diet would have been similar to hillbillies who are mostly vegetarian but will eat road kill when they find it.
Anyway maybe as long as 3 million years ago Australopithecines began to use tools probably for opening hard shelled fruits and nuts (many other primates do this today) and eventually adapted this behaviour to eating animals. It is thought that meat consumption was a factor but didn't really catch on until the first member of our genus Homo habilis began to eat meat which led to morphological changes late in their history. This was in part a result of a climate change event in Africa leading to ecological change from large amounts of forested regions to large amounts of savannah. Since they could no longer obtain their preferred food with the forests dying off, they had to adapt or starve and increased the amount of meat consumption. For a while it was thought that this was the first time the Hominins ate meat but now that seems unlikely at least to some researchers.
Anyway Homo sapiens arose about four hundred thousand years ago, with modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) evolving about 150-200Kya. The modern age didn't begin until the end of the most recent ice age about 10Kya, so the time frame referred to by "Palaeolithic" extends from when stone tools were first modified for use (as long as 2.5 million years ago) to this point. Hence there were massive variations in diet across this period, since humans evolved through several distinctly different morphological forms and began to spread throughout the world from about 80-60Kya. By 50Kya they were in Australia, and by 15-12Kya they were in the Americas. So there would have been vast differences between the diets of these peoples with only very general patterns being common to them such as opportunistic scavenging, hunting of large prey and seasonal variations in fruit, vegetable and fungi intakes.
WILLIAM R LEONARD and MARCIA L. ROBERTSON. Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Nutrition: The Influence of Brain and Body Size on Diet and Metabolism. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY 6:77-88 (1994).
RL Susman, Fossil evidence for early hominid tool use. Science 9 September 1994: Vol. 265 no. 5178 pp. 1570-1573.
Panger et al., Older than the Oldowan? Rethinking the emergence of hominin tool use. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews Volume 11, Issue 6, pages 235–245, 2002.