Below follow two excerpts from the book "The Stone Age Present" by William F Allman that I posted on the raw-food list a few days ago and which I think might be of some interest to this list as well. Best, Peter [log in to unmask] "To be sure, our modern-day bodies reflect the evolutionary legacies of a long history of eating meat. It is not only the big human brain that distinguishes humans from our evolutionary cousins, the apes; our bowels do, too: The gut of an ape is dominated by the large colon - the big, tubelike organ that helps process the tough fibers of plant food - and this testifies to the ape’s everyday diet of massive amounts of vegetation. The human gut, on the other hand, is unique among primates in that it is dominated by the small intestine, which is where protein and nutrients are rapidly broken down and absorbed - an anatomical arrangement that suggests that humans have long been eating nutrient-rich foods such as fruits, nuts, and meat. Further evidence that this dietary preference stretches far back into antiquity comes from the fossil teeth of our ancient human ancestors, which have only a thin coating of enamel and show none of the grit marks and heavy wear that would result from a diet consisting solely of tough plant fibers. Also, the human body can’t make A or B12, two vital substances that are commonly found in meat. But other quirks of our modern-day "eating anatomy" reveal that the meat our ancestors typically ate was by no means like the sirloin we consume today. The human body absorbs 95 percent of the fat we ingest, suggesting that this compact source of calories was extremely hard to come by in ancient times. This legacy of our ancient ancestors’ eating has created a psychology of food preference that is celebrated in the local burger palace. Having existed for eons in an environment where only lean meat was available, our ancestors would have found a fast-food hamburger a gustatorial paradise. It is precisely what our ancestors loved about fat - its incredibly rich content of calories - that makes it so bad in modern times, when fat is available in great quantities. This evolutionary legacy in our food psychology is the reason that fatty foods cause so much trouble for those of us who live in the food-rich industrialized West today: Having evolved in an environment where fat was scarce, our modern-day minds have a hard time knowing when to stop. Meat is the ideal food for the most cooperative species on Earth: Packed with calories, meat is one of the most compact sources of nutrition going. In every type of environment from savanna to Arctic, hunting large game provides the most calories per hour of work among all the various ways of obtaining food, regardless of whether people are using stone-tipped spears, nets, fishhooks, or bows and arrows. Thus meat is a great bargaining chip for social relations. A person could typically gather and carry about enough plant food for at most only a few people to eat. The carcass of a large mammal, however, contains enough food for many people, making it ideal for sharing with friends or neighbors, courting lovers, tending to the sick, or provisioning a family." ----------------------------------------------------------------------- "The first big sign that our ancient ancestors had begun to make the changeover to including meat in their diet comes with excavations of the archaeological sites of the 2-million-year-old ancestor Homo habilis. One of the most famous places where this ancient ancestor plied its trade is Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, which is often called "the Grand Canyon of prehistory." At one site there, dating back about 1.85 million years, archaeologists uncovered several huge piles containing more than 2,500 stone tools and some 15,000 pieces of animal bones ranging from mice to pigs to antelope to elephants. In keeping with the old "man the hunter" image of our forebears, anthropologists at first assumed these piles of stones were the remains of campsites left behind by roving bands of hunters. Thought to be evidence of "home bases" not unlike those of modern hunter-gatherers, the sites suggested that early humans had a life-style where men hunted for meat as women gathered plant foods. Later these ancient ancestors would meet back at their home base and share their food others, perhaps engaging in the beginnings of the social and cultural practices that characterize modern human culture. A circular arrangement of stones was uncovered at Olduvai that resembled the remains of the twig huts built by modern hunter-gatherers, and so was proposed as evidence of early home building. As attractive as this vision of our ancient ancestors’ life was, however, archaeologists discovered evidence of a very different life-style when they began to look more closely at the stones and bones Homo habilis left behind. Putting the bones under an electron microscope, researchers found that many of the ancient bones bore un- mistakable signs of cuts and gouges made by stone tools, in much the same way that a wooden kitchen cutting board is scored by the cutting action of a knife. The cut marks are clear evidence that our ancient ancestors were using tools to cut the meat off the bones in the sites of Olduvai. But while the powerful vision demonstrated that our ancestors were eating meat nearly 2 million years ago, it also revealed other marks on the bones that made the notion of our ancestors living like miniature boy Scouts at home bases a lot less likely. Many of the bones bore scratch marks, for instance, that were made by the teeth of a carnivores such as hyenas, suggesting that animals other than humans also ate the bones at the Olduvai sites. Other scratch marks on the bones revealed that, at least part of the time, our Home habilis ancestors were not hunting but scavenging for their meat. On some bones, scratch marks made by stone tools cross over marks that had previously been made by carnivore teeth, and on other bones there are teeth marks that cross over tool marks. Thus both carnivores and hominids appear to have eaten the same bone. On about half these doubly cut bones the hominid made the cut first, suggesting that the carnivore got to the bones after the hominid discarded them. On the other half, however, the carnivore tooth marks appear first, suggesting that our ancient ancestors had scavenged the bone from a carnivore kill site."