Extinct Species of Early Human Survived On Grass Bulbs, Not Meat 318
Philip Ross writes "Fresh analysis of an extinct relative of humans suggests our ancient ancestors dined primarily on tiger nuts, which are edible grass bulbs, settling a discrepancy over what made up prehistoric diets. According to a new study published in the journal PLOS One, the strong-jawed ancient hominin known as Paranthropus boisei, nicknamed 'Nutcracker Man,' which roamed East Africa between 2.4 million and 1.4 million years ago, survived on a diet scientists previously thought implausible."
What's next - tiger penis? (Score:5, Funny)
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don't need all that fancy DNA, billions could be made on a virus that only need deliver the "bigger"
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Obligatory: SMBC Developmental biology [smbc-comics.com] :)
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Re:Birmingham, England is NOT in India. (Score:5, Funny)
In England, people typically don't eat penises.
It must be this little fact that accounts for the high divorce rate. It's the French, who fuck with their faces, and fight with their feet... ;-)
Tiger nuts? Not meat? (Score:5, Funny)
Come on... it's funny and you know it.
But okay. Humanoids who didn't eat meat, didn't make the evolutionary cut.
Take THAT "vegetarians."
Re:Tiger nuts? Not meat? (Score:5, Informative)
The paleo movement is frustrating for anthropologists. Humans ate pretty much whatever they could get their grubby little hands on: meat, nuts, edible leaves, roots, fruit, etc. We did eat quite a bit of plants, though. Mostly because they didn't run away.
Vegans who insist we're herbivores are equally frustrating, however.
Re:Tiger nuts? Not meat? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Tiger nuts? Not meat? (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed. Humans are the best long distance runners on the planet, and we evolved that way so that we could chase our prey until they died of exhaustion.
I thought we evolved that way so that Reebok could sell us new shoes. Huh.
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Shoes aren't good for running. The best long distance runners run barefoot.
Re:Tiger nuts? Not meat? (Score:5, Funny)
You wouldn't believe the stamina of an onion on the chase. No wonder our forefathers could run so well.
Re:Tiger nuts? Not meat? (Score:5, Funny)
I dreamed I was a dinosaur
A mighty fearsome beast
All day I'd run and hunt for fun
On weaker beasts I'd feast
Then I thought "I am a man,
the fiercest beast of all"
And then I went and hunted down
A giant pretzel at the mall.
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Here's a picture [pinterest.com] of them.
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Wow, by any chance did you read "Born to Run"??? Because long distance runners are the ones saying persistence hunting is a thing. Most scientists aren't.
Persistence hunting is impossible in anything but big open fields, and precludes the idea of humans working together in camps (nobody's dragging an antelope back 20 miles). Humans get foot injuries easily.
Re:Tiger nuts? Not meat? (Score:4, Insightful)
And, I'm not a runner (although I do a load of cycling which is also endurance based).
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Reducing the hair and especially increasing the number of sweet glands are probably quite simple modifications. And we had over a million years to become what we are, so only minimal selective pressure is needed.
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Also, hmmm sweet glands!
Re:Tiger nuts? Not meat? (Score:4, Interesting)
Go stand in the sun near the equator for an hour, or run through elephant grass, or move through a thicket, and then tell me if you're still of the same opinion. Clothes are not only for the cold.
Re:Tiger nuts? Not meat? (Score:4, Insightful)
Like, say, the open savanna where homo sapiens evolved?
If your hunting party has any strategy, you won't chase it those 20 miles in a straight line.
Humans who have worn shoes all their lives get foot injuries easily.
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It takes a remarkable amount of calories to run each mile. Lean meat has very few calories. You're quite unlikely to come out ahead with this strategy. Finding an already sick or injured animal (or a very young one) without much "run" left in it is a much better plan. Ambush and a short chase is a much better plan. There's a reason no actual predators use the "run until the prey dies of exhaustion" strategy.
Never be both a beater and a shooter, as the saying goes. Amusing, but true.
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> It takes a remarkable amount of calories to run each mile. Lean meat has very few calories.
Both of these claims are simply incorrect.
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The only incorrect thing here is your claim.
First, running is one of the more strenuous sports. Second, lean meat has indeed few calories (~110 kcal for 100g). That amount is barely enough for a single mile. Besides, ever heard of "rabbit starvation"?
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Erm, actual predators do that. Ever heared about a "wolf"?
Human muscels work different then most animals muscels do. Anymals usually use the whole muscle, all fibres, for actions. Humans only roughly 40%. The fibres used in human muscles change, the tired ones stop working, fresh ones spring in.
Bottom line that means less heat is produced, less callories are burned.
Fort he animal it means, espeacially if it can not cool via sweating or similar means, it will collapse due to OVERHEAT not due to exhaustion.
So
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You would be surprised how few callories even the most serious sport/excerise takes.
Main reason why people are fat: oh, with a bit of sports it is no problem to eat 2000 extra kcal (not mentioning ofc, that those people usually don't do any sports at all).
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You would be surprised how few callories even the most serious sport/excerise takes.
I think everyone who's ever tried to lose weight via exercise is aware how hard it is. You get endurance and strength but burning surplus calories is really slow. Roughly 2000 kcal and you're keeping your weight, add 1000 kcal and it'll take me two hours of exercise to get rid of it. And if you have the food, we can consume a lot of calories. Here's an example of 72oz steak eaten in less than 3 minutes [gawker.com]. Extreme endurance athletes often consume 10.000 calories a day.
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Why would you assume they ate only the lean meat? Everything I've read about modern hunter-gatherers and cultures that ate mostly animals (such as the Inuit) is that they focused on the fats and fatty tissues and that the lean meats were often left for their dogs.
In the Western diet, we tend to focus on the lean meats and throw out the fats (the most energy-rich part of the animal) but that doesn't necessarily apply to humans living in the wild.
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No. But the album is great. Some of Bruce's best work.
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Well we all know that scientists are infalible right? After all we had many 100 years ago that believed eugenics was the solution to protect mankind. And today we've got others in wingnut territory.
And with that, if you believe that persistence hunting is impossible in anything but big open fields, I'm sure that after getting their first few foot injuries various individuals will have figured out that wrapping animal skins around their feet would help stop the problem. This is most easily recognized with
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What has the "open field" to do with that? Neither the deer hunted, nort he man hunting, cares if it is in an open field or in a wood.
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Ask a sprinter how'd he'd fare being chased by a group of marathoner's for a day or two that had spears. Their endurance wouldn't last. Now put him in a fur coat and take away his sweat glands.
You know, this is why Mom won't let us play with you any more.
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You should do some more research into the Paleo diet before posting such nonsense.
Most of it is about avoiding foods that your ancestors 100 years ago, and perhaps 10,000 years ago would not define as food (depending on how strict you are).
Highly processed foods (e.g. twinkies) very rarely end up being healthy for you, and often contain ingredients your body has not evolved to digest. Case in point: high fructose corn syrup. The pathway for your body to get rid of it involves directly converting it into f
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"Not evolved to digest". Appeal to nature fallacy! [wikipedia.org]
Also please stop using computers. Man's eyes were not evolved to read computer screens and mankind's fingers were not evolved to used keyboards.
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Well like it or not the pathways your body uses to process and digest food ARE the results of natural evolution.
And as I evolved to be a hunter, probably sitting on my ass in front of a computer every day has resulted in my being over weight (even if I go to the gym for an hour, I just can't undue the damage of not being active).
Humans need to have a better feel for what their bodies are designed for. Little things like standing up while in front of a computer can help you be healthier and feed better.
It's
Re:Tiger nuts? Not meat? (Score:5, Interesting)
I sit in front of my computer all day, too, but I've never had a weight problem. If anything, I have a problem keeping it on. Of course, I drink water all day rather than soda, and when I eat at a restaurant I usually take half the meal home because it's just way too much food.
As to the anonymous idiot you responded to who said "Man's eyes were not evolved to read computer screens and mankind's fingers were not evolved to used keyboards," what a moron. Computer screens and keyboards were designed to work with the fingers and eyes we evolved. HFCS wasn't.
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You may be blessed with great genetics. Feel lucky LOL
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The Paleo diet might be efficient for the species to survive. Individuals in a modern context? Not so much. You're talking about a species of hunter-gatherers who lived in small bands. A good strategy might be having the women pop out a baby every other year, men who die at 40, and a handful of post-menopausal women live to 50 to care for the extra children. That's probably not what you're expecting with the Paleo Diet.
If longevity is your goal, I think you're better off studying the habits of people w
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Highly processed foods (e.g. twinkies) very rarely end up being healthy for you
Once upon a time we called avoiding eating foods like that eating healthy, not whatever fad diet is in vogue this year.
Case in point: high fructose corn syrup. The pathway for your body to get rid of it involves directly converting it into fat in your liver.
HFCS is treated basically the same as sugar, just don't overdo it.
there is some evidence that it's not processed by your body as efficiently as meats and veggies.
And there's lots of evidence that any more than moderate amounts of meat are pretty bad for you, but 'no bacon' doesn't sell fad diets very well.
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The leaver does not store fat.
It stores sugar.
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Yes and a huge number of them suffering and dying of nutrition related illnesses. We have massive morbid obesity and massive diabetes. We have massive other problems related to the chemicals we use to kill pests of all sorts including plants, insects, varmints and more. It's insane how bad our modern food actually is.
Heterotrophs Unite! (Score:2)
Why just steal calories from animals? Spread the suffering to those dratted plants as well! :)
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If they were ancestors of modern humans, I'd say that they "made the evolutionary cut" quite nicely. We may not be "the fittest", but we are still around.
Extinct species survived (Score:5, Funny)
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The Time Machine (Score:2)
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"There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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Here, I will help you out and let you use religious rhetoric also. Before the biblical flood, everyone and everything , was a vegan. So strike one up for science I guess. err.. something like that.
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Just one example, humans ARE different than even the great apes in terms of their digestive systems. [anthropogeny.org]
Humans probably are omnivores but have many special adaptions, including jaw sizes more like herbivores, not (only) because of hard foods but also to allow us to smile, another important ele
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Thankfully, our current food sources are not dependent on the climate.
Seriously?!
Not an ancestor (Score:5, Informative)
A somewhat minor nitpick, but...
It is generally thought that Paranthropus bosei is an /offshoot/ of the line that ultimately led to modern man, not a direct ancestor. We share ancestors, but do not descend from his line. The two lines diverged about 3 million years ago to follow their own evolutionary paths - homo towards an omnivorous diet and world domination, panthropus to munching on nuts and extinction.
He was a relative, not an ancestor.
Re:Not an ancestor (Score:5, Insightful)
A somewhat minor nitpick, but...
It is generally thought that Paranthropus bosei is an /offshoot/ of the line that ultimately led to modern man, not a direct ancestor. We share ancestors, but do not descend from his line. The two lines diverged about 3 million years ago to follow their own evolutionary paths - homo towards an omnivorous diet and world domination, panthropus to munching on nuts and extinction.
He was a relative, not an ancestor.
Plus it is pretty iffy to base too many conclusions on a handful of skeletons (or in the case of such old homonids it's usually skeletal fragments). If archaeologists of the future only had five 20th century human skeletons available that were all found in the general area that used to be New York they might conclude that most humans of the 20th century were over weight and lived off a meat rich diet. If those five skeletons came from the horn of Africa they would conclude that during the 20th century the human race suffered from frequent famines. If the five skeletons came from the graveyard of a vegan colony they'd conclude humans of the 20th century were predominantly vegan. If the discoveries in Dmanisi, Georgia [rt.com] have taught us anything it is that one should not base too many sweeping conclusions on a handful of samples.
http://rt.com/news/skull-homo-georgia-species-373/ [rt.com]
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I have to wonder as well if the diet contributed to the survivability of the bone in the fossilization process.
Re:Not an ancestor (Score:5, Insightful)
You only need to go back 200 years before we had anything like modern refrigeration and the food had to be very fresh and very local. Most people were subsistance farmers, meaning they primarily ate what they produced. If you had game, you ate game and if you didn't, you didn't. If you had a river or lake nearby with fish you ate fish, if not you didn't. If barley grew better than wheat, you ate barley. Your diet was defined by your surroundings.
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munching on nuts and extinction.
"Awe, nuts! Again!?"
And so it was until one fateful day: Fed up with nuts they decided to try extinction...
They were gluttons for punishment.
When we are extinct (Score:5, Insightful)
We will be said to have dined primarily on high fructose corn syrup.
Somehow I think there's going to be some big holes in what they actually do "know" about what those folks ate.
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Well, given the diet of the young in the last 20 or 30 years...I think HFCS is the correct analysis. The future beings will assume we were like hummingbirds.
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Isn't corn a type of grass? So they'll say we survived on grass.
Eat Meat! (Score:2, Funny)
Now scientifically proven.
.
How can we be sure... (Score:2)
...that they weren't crushed by the dinosaurs [icr.org]?
Survived? (Score:2)
I think the key word here is "extinct".
Re:And that's why they're extinct (Score:4, Insightful)
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And if they are extinct - maybe it's because their diet was too specialized?
It's a relatively common factor that a species that goes extinct is too specialized. Of course there are other factors involved too.
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P.boisei survived for around (2.8-1.4 ~=) 1.4 million years ; "Anatomically Modern Humans" have been around for about one tenth of that, if not less.
Who were you calling a too-specialised non-survivor?
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Tiger nuts? Grass bulbs?
You laugh, but I just recently ate Matzo balls in soup.
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Damn. Did you have to kill the Matzo first? Or is it like making steers?
Re:They foraged for 2-3 hours per day (Score:5, Funny)
What did they do with the rest of their day?
Not (enough) sex, otherwise they wouldn't be extinct
Re:They foraged for 2-3 hours per day (Score:4, Funny)
Whew.
If the prerequisite hurdle for reproduction includes a steady diet of tiger nuts, I, for one, an quite certainly glad those bad motherfskerers aren't around to compete with for mates.
Re:They foraged for 2-3 hours per day (Score:5, Insightful)
They survived 1,000,000 years. We've been going at it for 200,000 years or so, and we're constantly at risk of killing ourselves off en masse. I'd say they did a lot better than we are doing on the species survival front.
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Don't worry: regardless of how we screw things up, ants will remain.
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They survived 1,000,000 years.
That span is not necessarily how long they were around, but rather the uncertainty about when they were around.
Re:They foraged for 2-3 hours per day (Score:4, Interesting)
57 million people died during WWII, yet the Earth finished it with 20 million more people than it started with.
Re:They foraged for 2-3 hours per day (Score:5, Funny)
What did they do with the rest of their day?
Probably proselytize to their meat-eating neighbors about how their vegetarian diet is superior.
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What did they do with the rest of their day?
Probably proselytize to their meat-eating neighbors about how their vegetarian diet is superior.
Who got fed up with hearing that crap that they killed them off... :)
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What did they do with the rest of their day?
First aid.
Re:They foraged for 2-3 hours per day (Score:4, Funny)
They scrawled graffiti on public rocks. We humanoids haven't evolved much since then.
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Human hunter gatherers, at least the ones in the richer environments, also only foraged a couple of hours a day. The ones that lived around here actually could get by with 2 weeks work a year harvesting the salmon.
They spent a lot of time sitting around the fire bull shitting, visiting the nieghbours and such. Artistic things like carvings and if bored, little things like making a dugout canoe could eat a lot of time. Cutting down a 10 ft thick tree with fire and stone, carving it out with fire and stone, d
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Yeah, they worked two weeks a year, catching a few hundret salmons every day. Those they put into the fridge(es), so they could last the rest of the year.
Ah, well, I guess you try to sarcastic.
As a matter of fact, dentistry goes back 40.000 years an more. Holes where drilled ino teeth and birch tar was used to fill them. Ancient humans even did brain surgery and covered the opened sculles with shells from mussels.
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...being a vegetarian is bad for the longevity of the species, and thus wrong.
Humans did not evolve to be vegetarians. Vegetarians and particularly vegans will end up needing to take supplements of some vitamins found solely in meat (e.g. vitamin B12).
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humans did not evolve to be vegetarians is a nonsense statement. evolution implies there is no intent.
[citation needed] on the supplements.
i've been a vegetarian for 26 years. i do not take supplements. for many years i biked up to 100 miles a day, including a 3100 mile month. now it could be, i'm a stan lee superhuman, but i doubt it.
my personal suspicion is that like other areas in dietary research, there's a lot of self-affirming bullshit floating around.
Re:A blow to vegetarians (Score:4, Insightful)
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No, actually not. The paleo diet stresses it's not just eating meat that's healthy, but healthy cuts of meat.
Our ancestors would have slaughtered and killed a buffalo that had spent it's days running around all the time.
Modern humans eat a cow that's been force fed grain to make it fatter.
One is healthier then the other. And certainly eating grass fed beef is both delicious and more healthy.
The problem (and the reason I am no longer paleo) is the difficulty it really is to be "healthy." Pretty much if yo
Re:A blow to vegetarians (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean vegans, more precisely. Vegetarians usually (not always) eat animal products which do not involve slaughter of the animal, such as eggs & cheese -- both of which supply B12. The body only needs an extremely small ammount of B12, the smallest amount of any vitamin.
Anyhow, until vegans evolve away from the requirement for B12, or go extinct, it's really not hard for them to get enough from commonly B12 fortified products. Much tofu, nutritional yeast, and other common vegan ingredients are fortified with non-animal sources of B12.
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B12 is available in eggs, milk and cheese. I'm a vegetarian, take no supplements and am not deficient.
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Milk, cheese, and eggs are all animal products. Vegans wouldn't touch them.
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That's the difference between a Vegan and a Vegetarian...
Re:A blow to vegetarians (Score:5, Interesting)
True. My girlfriend is vegan and she takes B12 supplements, which is fine by me. The way I see it, it's much more environmentally friendly to produce a B12 tablet then it is to grow, slaughter and cook an animal.
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Vegetarianism is not one size fits all. You have all different degrees.
Some vegetarians will, for instance, not eat cheese because you may have to kill cows to make it (little known fact, often something from the gut of cows is used to make cheese)
Others won't eat eggs (have you seen what they do in chicken farms!)
Others will eat fish because they don't see fish as animals.
So while, yes, YOU may be a vegetarian who does not need to take B12 supplements, SOME vegetarians do (basically the closer you get to
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Most vegetarians know about rennet in cheese. I always check the label.
Re:A blow to vegetarians (Score:5, Informative)
You can get B12 from fermented foods, milk products, eggs, and algae. In fact, it's not even produced by animals, only by bacteria.
Re:A blow to vegetarians (Score:4, Informative)
B12 is produced by bacteria in fermentation tanks and then ends up in tablets for vegans to eat, and in animal feed for farm animals to eat. The B12 you get from meat comes from the same exact place as the stuff in tablets.
There are actually no essential nutrients created by animals.
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They did survive for 5 times longer then we have so another 800,000 years of Homo Sapiens before you can say we survived for longer.
They probably died out when the climate changed, like most species and even human civilizations. Our advantage is being very general purpose and we don't really know how general purpose this species was, they still might of eaten a lot of insects along with sedges for example.
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This proves it: Vegetarism damages your humour. ;-)
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Re:I object (Score:4, Funny)
Since your comment history strongly suggests you are American and the study was carried out by paleoanthropologists from Oxford University, I can safely say you have no need to be concerned about your tax dollars funding this research.
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What in the hell is an anti-science dimwit doing at a nerd site?? You just come here to troll?
I guess you'd rather use that money to bomb foreigners and spy on Americans?
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I think you missed the "crap" science joke about studying the "poop" of extinct species. It is literally crap science and he had to find a way to put that in a post.
So lets take a second, pull not knots out of our panties because the got all bunched up over a comment, and get back to treating people respectfully.
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We can't have people hearing that humans aren't supposed to eat animals! Quick! Repeat "hunter-gatherer" over and over and over...
Human beings quite clearly aren't supposed to eat meat. Humans don't have claws. We can't open our mouths wide enough to grab an animal in our jaws, unless it's tiny. We most certainly can't kill animals by biting their vertebrae, or by biting them to death, again unless they're tiny. We can't run fast enough to catch animals.
But LOL at all the brainwashed Slashdot sociopaths who can't bring themselves to THINK or QUESTION what they eat. That would be like, scary, wouldn't it...
Your so-called 'friends' wouldn't like you if you started caring about innocent creatures who are brutally tortured to death, would they...
Of course, most scientists believe it was the added proteing from animal sources that enabled our brains to form as they did and become what today is known as homo sapiens. If nothing else, the amino acids needed to sustain homo sapiens cannot be found in every geographic location by using only plant sources. Unlike today, early humans didn't have the ability to ship produce around the world.
So, while there were early anscestors that didn't eat meat, it doesn't mean 1) they were human and 2) that homo sap