Posted on 02/11/2019 6:51:30 AM PST by Openurmind
YALE UNIVERSITY—Long before human ancestors began hunting large mammals for meat, a fatty diet provided them with the nutrition to develop bigger brains, posits a new paper* in Current Anthropology.
The paper argues that our early ancestors acquired a taste for fat by eating marrow scavenged from the skeletal remains of large animals that had been killed and eaten by other predators. The argument challenges the widely held view among anthropologists that eating meat was the critical factor in setting the stage for the evolution of humans.
Our ancestors likely began acquiring a taste for fat 4 million years ago, which explains why we crave it today,” says Jessica Thompson, the paper’s lead author and an anthropologist at Yale University. “The reservoirs of fat in the long bones of carcasses were a huge calorie package on a calorie-poor landscape. That could have been what gave an ancestral population the advantage it needed to set off the chain of human evolution.”
https://popular-archaeology.com/article/a-taste-for-fat-may-have-made-us-human-says-study/
Animals have eaten fat long before we did. They’re still animals. ?
If you look to less developed cultures, they often eat the fatty parts of the animal - meaning the organs - over the meat. For them the meat is for feeding the animals.
Well of course that's ... uh ... well you see ... the difference is that ... well in humans eating meat was different because ... evolution.
She is one fugly woman.
A lot of wild game has very little fat and calories in the meat it’s self. You can gorge on rabbit meat protein and still starve to death from lack of calories. The organ meats are where all the fat and calories are. So what you share here makes sense.
Yale. No, thanks.
Don’t preditors typically eat the entrails and visceral fat of their prey first?
Fat, is where it’s at.
The pursuit of such tasty fat is probably what made us relatively squirrelly, too.
The French and Chinese are less developed?
The same study has also been done in the past by other more creditable sources. This is one where you can’t throw away the content just because of the source.
They sure do. Without calories from fat they can’t survive. But why didn’t their brains get bigger too? lol
Because she is a cow, and eats grains and sugar and plant-based food. And cheetos.
That’s a “ Just So “ story if I ever heard one.
French cuisine (and that of lots of Europe) retains vestiges of those ancient preferences (and medieval staples) but as niche items. Most people there are not shunning steak for hearts or brains as their main source of protein. And they can't, really, because a hell of a lot more people can be fed on the meat from a cow than can on it's liver and brain. The population can't be sustained on organ meat at this point.
But I'm specifically talking about people like the Inuit. Historically they lived on animals for food exclusively because nothing grows there and they must hunt to eat. Once they have a kill they have two choices: muscle meat or organs. They prefer the organs, fat and marrow because they pack the most nutritional punch. Since they tend to be in smaller groups there's enough of that to go around unlike in modern western cities.
Dumb way to state it. Revised: Eating meat favored the growth of our superior brain.
I believe our ancestors ate fat. But that 4 million years stuff is a crock; and not a crock of fat, either. They, and we eat fat because it’s good and good FOR us. God told the Jews, if they did right and obeyed Him, they would enjoy the fat of the land, “and thou shalt be fat.” I choose to believe and obey God, and keep on enjoying the good stuff.
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