> Very early ancestors survived on tropical plants, new study suggests > http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121214200916.htm > > Perry "I ain't buyi the paleo fantasy bro science" Bessas
It's all fine, but that study talks about apes (3 to 3.5 million years ago). Homo habilus, the first Homo, evolved around 2.5 MYA/ Apes vs Homo Gut length: Apes have about 3x the yardage, the better to digest raw plantfood with. They have upside-down cone-shaped rib cages and long torsoes, to better hold the long yards of guts. Jaw muscles: Apes have strong ones that attache atop the skull. The raw food requires massive muscles. The act of chewing compresses the skull, no big deal because the brain is small. Human jawmucles attach around the temple and are thin...and the thin-ness and lower attachment point came about (so some believe) as a result of eating progressively more chewable and digestible food. Short story, as short as I can make it, and even this is too long considering I agree with the "change this topic" advice...but I will take this liberty because I was named in an original post. Skip over if you don't care to listen to a guy with a 2-year junior college degree talk, shall we say, above his ken. It took about 500,000 years, from 3 million years ago to 2.5 MYA, to evolve the first human (Homo habilus), and it likely resulted from eating meat, since Hh was out of the jungle and living in grasslands, eating leftover carrion at first. Raw meat is like gum, unless it's kobe beef or sashimi, so he pounded and sliced it and tenderized it this way. This let him eat more of it AND made it more digestible. Over time, the dietary change shrunk the gut, weakend the jaw muscles, and let the skull and brain expand. The bigger brain led to other things, but among them, cooking meat. Cooked meat is a cinch to digest and eat more of, and soon (in evolutionary terms), we got Homo ergaster. Homo ergaster learned to cook and hunt--upping his meat consumption even more---and morphed into Homo heidelbergensis (this is all from memory, I'm not googling this as I go, so I may be off some). Homo heidel....with his bigger brain, learned ways of gathering even more meat--hunting with others, and of course this was helped by still more shrunken jaw muscles, bigger skull, and brain expension to go with the bigger skull. He also learned to bake and in general was largely a meat eater. Now and then a root or something else, but the point is, all of these evolutionary changes that cause Homo sapiens to evolve just 200,000 years ago are ------ *related* to meat consumption, in some form or other. There were other things, but t is hard to make the case that the physical changes in guts and skulls, jaw muscles and brains---would have happened without meat. In any animal, the head geometry (including teeth) say something about the diet. The metabolic costs of pushing and digesting roughage through miles of guts to ultimate extract a few calories from them precludes growing a bigger brain, which, cubic centimeter by cubic centimeter, is the most metabolically expensive organ in the body. Something had to give, and it was the gut. This story is separate from any ethical issues that involve vegetariansim or greenhouse gases. Those are important, but purely in terms of what transpired along the evolutionary path from apes to Homo sapiens...meat had something to do with it. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en-US. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
