Responding to my own post here:

>I bet if you point out the fact of tool use going back 2 million years, you
>will find your students will, number one, probably not even be aware of the
>inseparable role tools seem to have played in the early diet of homo where
>meat is concerned. Or number two, if they have considered it, I have never
>heard a more than a flustered or opinionated comeback other than the weak
>and untestable excuse that, "Well, it was a lowering in consciousness that
>led humans to become debauched and out of touch with their instincts that
>led them to abandon former Edenic habits." To which the best response is,
>"Then explain the increasing brain size of homo as more sophisticated tool
>use and meat consumption increased."

Another interesting argument made by vegans--to get around the problem
early tool-use presents to their view that only foods processable by our
teeth alone should be eaten--is to suggest that we actually have to look
back prior to tool use to find the REALLY original human diet. In response
to a couple of us who had laid out the evolutionary viewpoint of human diet
in ongoing debates over on the raw-food listgroup late last year, this
argument was put forth by a threesome who call themselves "Nature's First
Law" (i.e., to eat raw food)--the latest rabid fundamentalist dietary
advocates to take the vegetarian world by storm, and who insist on not just
a vegan diet, but a *fruitarian* diet. (Fruits only.)

When I publicly asked them if they really meant to suggest that the ideal
human being was a 3.5 to 4-foot australopithecus living 3 to 4 million
years ago with a brain 1/3 the size of a modern human and a social
structure much like that of a chimpanzee, well, we never did get a response
from them to that one. ;-)

--Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]>