From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Mon Apr 14 2003 - 01:25:55 MDT
gts wrote:
> Barbara Lamar wrote:
>
>
>>From the archaeological evidence I've seen,
>>humans didn't become successful enough hunters to rely on
>>meat for a large % of their calories until relatively recently.
>
>
> Then you haven't seen the evidence.
>
> There is evidence that hominids were eating large game meat as far back as
> *2 million* years ago, though at the time we were scavengers rather than
> hunters. Sites were discovered that suggest early hominids were crushing the
> bones and eating the marrow of beasts killed by other predators.
As scavengers and before much tool use I would think that it
would be a relatively rare occurence that we got much of some
other animal's kill in competition with other more specialize
scavengers.
>
> I don't recall offhand the estimated date of the earliest evidence of
> wide-spread hunting but I know it was hardly "recent" in evolutionary terms.
> It is thought that Paleolithic humans in Europe actually hunted many species
> into extinction, which may itself have helped to give rise to the
> agricultural revolution out of sheer necessity.
>
> If you'll forgive me for saying so, your argument that Paleolithic diets
> were not largely animal-based (which I define as 30% to 50% of calories) is
> outdated. It's the last bastion of vegetarians and their kin who still cling
> to the old argument that we were living in trees and eating oranges and
> bananas until about 50,000 years ago.
>
There is no reason for such an accusation. Either the facts are
otherwise or they are not. Why make it a contest between those
who believe it best to eat no meat and those who believe it best
to eat some meat? Is the quesiton how much meat is healthy in
the human diet? Are we willing to really research into this and
acknowledge opinions and bias from facts? It is seems pretty
unlikely that Paleolithic diets were as much as 30-50% animal
based calaories. It is damn hard to hunt and bring in that much
meat regularly at that level of hominid development. Examining
our near cousins in the evolutionary tree today and primitive
societies I don't think there is a lot of evidence for such a
meat rich diet that far back. What more do you have?
- samantha
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