Posted on 02/11/2019 6:51:30 AM PST by Openurmind
YALE UNIVERSITYLong 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 papers 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/
I thought you were implying that there was something inferior in the enjoyment of organ meats.
Give me sweetbreads or liver any day of the week!
The French love foie gras and duck confit, wonderful fatty food. The Chinese have Peking duck where the crispy fatty duck skin is a course unto itself.
I posted that one several months back about how eating meat is what caused our brains to grow larger. This one just goes even deeper about what part of the meat did us the most good. :)
FAT... GOOD... lol
Traditional French cooking is very rich (and delicious!) all around.
But those are Offal... (pun intended) lol
I like organ meats too. Especially stuffed in sausage. :)
Fat is sought out by all omnivores and carnivores.
The idea that there were lots of long bones filled with fat, just lying around to be scavenged, is silly.
The idea that eating rabbits and other small game is not enough to sustain life is silly too.
When carnivores catch a rabbit, they eat all of it. They don't simply strip out the meat, like fastidious 20th century explorers might.
The Canadian Indians survived mostly on rabbits for long periods.
They skinned them and ate the rest of the rabbit. The entire rabbit went into the pot, when they had pots.
The skin was used to make woven rabbit blankets.
The rabbit thing is real... That is why you do have to eat it all including the organs. It is the same with quite a few species of very lean wild game. We just cannot survive without calories from fat or replacements for it.
https://www.raising-rabbits.com/rabbit-starvation.html
Does that mean the Atkins diet will make one less smart? Please say it’s so - I need to let my wife know...
From what I understand Atkins allows calories from fat it’s just lean on carbs, two different critters. lol
You can get fat from rabbits.
You just need to eat the fat the rabbit offers.
You can get quite a bit of nutrition from the partially digested stomach contents as well.
And the eyes. :)
We did a study out in the desert southwest on archaic native american Metates, or grinding stones. The studies intent was to see what primary grains and plant matter were ground and consumed the most. They found almost no plant matter, it was all meat matter such as Rat, Mouse, and lizards.
Apparently their primary foods were very small animals and reptiles ground to a paste and cooked like a pancake on hot rocks. The vegans who introduced the study were a bit confused about this and refused to publish this truth. lol
Fascinating information about the metate study.
When did it happen?
Moderate protien, high fat diet is far far more of what our bodies are built to utilize than the insanely high carbohydrate diet that the modern american diet tends to be.
I can eat 2 hard boiled eggs for breakfast and be good until lunch, or I can eat a bowl of cereal and milk and be hungry in an hour. Or a couple of pieces of toast, and be hungry in an hour... even though all 3 meals contain roughly the same calories.
That’s a fact. There is a big difference between fat calories and carbs.
I would say approximately 6 years ago? Close to that.
;-)
I love rabbit, grew up in the southwest eating a lot of rabbit and hare. We even raised them for quite awhile. Domestic is much tastier. :)
The best tasting thing we raised though was Emu.
It is a fascinating look at how archaeologists routinely sanitized pre-history to preseverve their Rosseuian view of the noble savage.
The author shows how common and deadly pre-historic warfare was.
No I have not read it but should. But I understand what you say. As a historian it is one of my pet peeves. They will go so far as to change it as much as they hide it. For some reason ever since the beginning of the Anglican studies of ancient history this has been the case.
It is still practiced today even by non-Christians in the fields of archaeology and anthropology. Sometimes without any real plausible or needed reason to except for maybe protecting income from books and classes.
It’s become compulsive and you have to read between the lines and find the truth for yourself. And... Sometimes you get fortintae enough to be close to a study like this and see it first hand. Yet that is not what gets published or it gets buried.
Like the still thought notion that all native americans were ignorant savages because they didn’t have the wheel. They understood the wheel just fine. Just had no need for it. With the wheel comes the need for the infrastructure to utilize this wheel. The only need for a wheel is when one is greedy or glutenous and want to carry more than they truly need to survive.
When this continent was “founded” the savages already had a very efficient and well organized government. So well organized that our own framers studied it and adopted some of the principles for our own as they framed our new one. True historical knowledge is being strongly suppressed, especially by religion, and it is an absolute crime for an honest objective historian.
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