Waaay back Dean wrote: > One of the most common arguments advanced by advocates of > vegetarianism and by some other commentators on health is that humans > evolved as vegetarian or mostly-vegetarians. The most frequently > forwarded argument to advance this position is that human tooth and > jaw structrure are clearly those of herbivores with flat molars, > excellent sideways chewing motion and with a clear lack of sharp > teeth for killing prey. Homo has lousy sideways grinding compared to real hervivores: bovines, horses etc. Our jaw doesn't work very well that way by comparison. We lack the long gut of horses and/or multiple stomachs of ruminants that are essential to their ability to process raw grain and more appropriately grass and/or browse. We don't process green leaves of most plant species. Cabbage, kale, lettuce etc. sure. Grape leaves somewhat if very young/early. Not much else other than fruit. Try eating whole grain w/o milling and extensive cooking: you'll break your teeth. Try eating a minimally significant amount of grass: it won't stay down. We don't process grain (seeds of grasses) well unless cooked. We handle nuts and some seeds fine. We've evolved using other tools for handling meat: hands and cultural adaptations: stone tools. We got into stone tools long before the rise of Homo; stone tools appropriate for processing animals for meat, hides and other tool material, not for processing grain until very recently (5000-8000ya, then as microblades for scythes and concurrent with rise of agriculture demonstrated by other artifacts). I think _Paleolithic_Prescription_ details our evolution very well. You want a real herbivorous hominoid: look at the robust Australopithecines: A. boisei; A. robustus. Their molars were easily twice the dimensions of ours; their incisors and canines easily less than half the size of ours. They had large sagittal crests: attachment for huge chewing muscles. Their teeth are found to be heavily worn as by dirt etc. in their food implying grain and seed eating. Depending on one's cladistics they are high probability a divergent branch of our ancestral A. afarensis (Lucy), not as likely our direct ancestors. They're extinct. Other herbivores: Gorilla gorilla. Much more evident canines than ours. Similar molars. Omnivores: Pan paniscus & Pan troglodytes: the chimps. Dentition much like the gorillas. I think we must conclude that dentition isn't much of a guarantee of dietary interpretations. I saw a moose mandible yesterday. The molars looked more like a dog's than man's. ! > I most recently heard a snippet of this line of thinking on a > popular news show here in America called "Nightline" in which a > medical doctor and health writer advanced this view. > > I wonder if anyone among our membership would like to comment on > this line of reasoning? Perhaps such 'reasoning' is more likely rationalizing. Ah... noting that chimps are regular hunters and meat eaters and their primary meat source is other primates perhaps one can imagine as Joseph Campbell (_The_Way_of_the_Animal_Powers_) did that the extinction of the robust vegetarian Australopithecines is at least partly due to the dietary practices of various carnivores including early Homo. Physical anthropology shows that the last of the ancestors of the primates were insectivores this probably being responsible for our dependence on concentrated vitamin, protein and fat sources.