On Tue, 6 Oct 1998, Amadeus Schmidt wrote:

> But I don't judge if we are more like a chimp or a dog,
> a sheep or a thyrannosaurus rex ;-)
> Personally I consider myself a human :-)

But this isn't quite accurate, Amadeus.  You have in fact
persistently argued that we are more like chimps than dogs, and
that the animal protein portion of our diet should be
correspondingly low.

Jared Diamond's very interesting book, _The Third Chimpanzee_,
gives some support to your view.  Diamond is a physiologist with
a good knowledge of paleoanthropology and experience living with
modern hunter-gatherers.  Diamond argues that while
humans/hominids have been hunters for a long time, the evidence
suggests that they didn't get to be very good at it until
relatively recently.  He writes:

        It's not until much later, arond 100,000 years ago, that
        we have good evidence about human hunting skills, and
        it's clear that humans then were still very *ineffective*
        big-game hunters.  Hence human hunters of 500,000 years
        ago and earlier must have been even more ineffective.
        [19]

He argues that the idea of Man the Hunter has been and continues
to be mythologized, giving as an example his experience living in
New Guinea.  There, the men would discuss in great detail the
habits of and best way to hunt various big-game animals, such as
the kangaroo.  He got the impression that killing these animals
must have been commonplace but soon learned that in reality "most
New Guinea hunters admit that they have only bagged a few
kangaroos in their entire lives."  When he accompanied them on
hunting expeditions, the more common yield was items such as
small birds, turtles, frogs, etc.

Diamond notes that human big-game hunting skills did improve,
especially in the parts of the world that started getting colder,
butt makes the point that this was not until *after* humans had
evolved to their present anatomical and physiological form, i.e.,
40,000 years ago, when the Neanderthals died out and Cro-Magnon
took over.  The point, of course, is that if this way of thinking
is right then extensive hunting and meat-eating is not what
propelled humanity to its present form.  He speculates that the
Neanderthals could not tolerate much meat, and this may be what
killed them off, however.

Diamond also mentions something that I had not heard before,
namely the the bones of older Neanderthals (i.e., 40 or older)
tended to show signs of severe osteoarthritis.

Todd Moody
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