People who eat meat claim that it is “natural” for humans to eat animals. You may hear arguments that humans should or should not eat meat based on various evolutionary, biological, or ethical considerations. Numerous studies have shown that meat is not ideal for the human body and can actually make us sick and kill us.
Eating meat may have played a key role in human evolution, but if we don’t stop eating it now, it could also lead to the death of our species. As scientists continue to gather evidence and add nuance to the “meat made us human” hypothesis, modern humans will have to decide whether to continue eating meat. Here we look at the major changes in nutrition that have taken place during human evolution and how the recent increase in meat consumption may lead to our downfall. Scientists still have many unanswered questions about the origin and evolution of human meat consumption, but there are several strong theories as to when, how, and why we began to include more meat in our omnivorous diet.
As soon as people began to eat meat at least occasionally, very soon it became the main part of our diet. Adding a moderate amount of meat to the diet of primitive man came with the discovery of fire, which allowed us to reduce the risk of getting sick or dying from parasites and bacteria in meat. When people began to add meat to their diet, the need for a long digestive tract, adapted to process large amounts of plant foods, disappeared. When people started cooking meat, it became even easier to digest meat quickly and efficiently and capture those calories to feed our growing brains.
The final clue to why the human diet can make modern humans sick comes from Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham, who argues that the greatest revolution in human nutrition happened not when we started eating meat, but when we learned how to cook. Meat clearly played a key role in the evolution of large animals, but this does not mean that meat is still an indispensable part of the modern human diet. There is no doubt that human evolution has much to do with the flesh. Killing animals and eating meat were important components of human evolution that had a synergistic relationship with other key traits that made us humans, with bigger brains, smaller intestines, upright posture and language.
As a new study in the journal Nature shows, not only did the processing and consumption of meat become natural for humans, but humans might not, or even become, humans without an early diet that included a lot of animal protein. At least not the modern, verbal, intelligent humans we have now. We have never had to eat meat or dairy (humans only started consuming it 6,000 years ago), our bodies were not designed to eat meat, and our health suffers.
Some people still mistakenly believe that we need meat to be healthy and that we are somehow designed to eat a lot of it. It has become an article of faith for veganism (with a capital letter) not only that eating meat is bad for humans, but has always been bad for humans, that we were never destined to eat animal products, and that our teeth, facial structure, and digestive system are proof of this. I see claims that humans were made to eat meat – that it’s in our genes, that we have teeth to eat meat, that we need meat to get all the nutrients we need – people eat it from all of us. media in stronger and weaker versions. While we modern humans, with facts and research at our fingertips, may be aware of some of the damage it does to our health, planet, and animals, we eat it because we are the product of cultures and societies that have inherited and normalized to eat meat.
Although meat consumption is criticized in Western societies for medical, environmental and humanitarian reasons, many people consider meat a desirable part of their diet and enjoy eating it. Other responses to current pressures to reduce meat consumption include various mechanisms, namely denial (denying that animals suffer and are killed for meat); religious reasons; health reasons; other reasons (claiming that humans are at the top of the food chain and we naturally adapt Eating meat, etc. The emergence of Homo erectus, the human ancestor, challenged the notion that “the flesh made us human.” Human traits are primarily associated with a shift in diet toward more meat consumption.
It’s clear that frequent meat consumption distinguishes humans from other primates, but the exact role it played in early human evolution was underlined in a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. challenge. It is no coincidence that the first evidence of widespread human flesh consumption in the archaeological record coincides with the first human “handymen” Homo habilis. Meat first became an important part of the pre-human diet some 2.6 million years ago, and if Australopithecus had the chance to slap him on the forehead, he would no doubt do so. Eating animal meat would give us food poisoning without the carnivorous stomach acid to kill the bacteria in the meat.