Is meat eating an evolutionary mystery? Humans are the only ones in the great ape family that eat a significant amount of meat. But human teeth which are designed for eating fruit cannot tear flesh easily, and digestive system has difficulty digesting it. Meat also is linked with a shorter life expectancy. It is said that fire drove the evolution of intelligence, but it would seem that it was the reverse since fire was invented quite recently, and intelligence had been increasing for a long time before it.

>>17830210 (OP)
Human ancestors evolved to be savannah nomads/hunters. Our eyes are tuned to scan the plains for herds of prey animals and our bodies are built for “endurance hunts” across many miles.

Humans have forward-facing eyes like all predatory mammals.

>>17830217
i don't think eating meat was possible before it could be cooked. Before 1 million years, humans would be herbivorous

>>17830226
Meat is much simpler and easier to break down than plant matter which is why herbivores have complex multi-chambered stomachs and often still have to swallow rocks to act as grindstones.

>>17830210 (OP)
>But human teeth which are designed for eating fruit cannot tear flesh easily
Homos have been using sharpened rocks for millions of years, there is no need to have razor sharp teeth when you can just make a knife.
>and digestive system has difficulty digesting it
Homos are omnivores and can eat anything really.

>>17830210 (OP)
>Is meat eating an evolutionary mystery?
Meat is an ample source of digestible calories and protein so there is a strong evolutionary impetus to consume meat. A tree climbing animal can find and digest insects and grubs easily which provides an evolutionary stepping stone to evolve enzymes that help break down protein and then to tougher red meat.

>Humans are the only ones in the great ape family that eat a significant amount of meat.
Chimpanzees eat a significant amount of meat and are often seen hunting other monkeys and have very pronounced canines. Orangutans eat many insects. Gorillas sometimes eat ants and termites. Many other monkeys eat meat.

>But human teeth which are designed for eating fruit cannot tear flesh easily
Our lack of pronounced canines is due to human tool use, both as weapons and carving animals, so our ancestors with shorter canines were not selected against.

>and digestive system has difficulty digesting it.
Humans can digest raw meat, however it takes more energy and due to our ability to cook food we are not as strongly geared for it as a dedicated carnivore like a panther.

>Meat also is linked with a shorter life expectancy.
The link is due to obesity and other bad habits not the meat itself. Being able to acquire meat from your environment would increase the life expectancy of a prehistoric hunter gatherer before modern medicine and with a far greater risk of starvation.

>It is said that fire drove the evolution of intelligence
There were many factors in favor of intelligence, tool use came before fire, however fire was very significant since it both opened up more opportunities for hominids and also increased selective pressure towards intelligence in order to take advantage of these opportunities.

Truth is plants usually need a lot of cooking to be edible, many are too hard to chew or digest in the raw state and often have poisons to discourage stuff from eating them.

>>17830210 (OP)
Fire was not invented, fire was here long before life even existed on this planet, humans simply harnessed fire to use as tool for cooking, heat and light

>>17830243
There are a lot of plants you can eat naturally. Many fruits, grains, lettuce, cabbage, many roots and tubers.

Niggas will eat game and bushmeat and wonder why we're getting HIV 2

>>17830250
Yup, humans are omnivores

>>17830250
Many of those require cooking though especially roots and tubers.

>>17830238
other great apes eat over 95% plant

>>17830210 (OP)
>Just don't live north of the Alps

>>17830210 (OP)
Why not ask /sci/?

>>17830245
Not to be a sci nigger but fire did not exist until a few hundred million years after life existed.
Basically photosynthesis led to more and more oxygen being made in the oceans which then saturated all the water so it went up into the atmosphere. This greater amount of oxygen then allowed fires to actually exist as they had enough fuel to keep burning.

>>17830329
The sun is a nuclear fire

Checkmate

>>17830210 (OP)
Nah humans weaponize versatility. We eat whatever the fuck doesn't kill us, and if it does we try to find a way to treat it to make it not kill us so we can eat it. Our wincon is eventually finding a way to eat the entire periodic table. We shall eat the universe or die trying.

>>17830361
Fusion is not a form of redox combustion.

>>17830234
>Homos have been using sharpened rocks for millions of years
That sounds reckless and irresponsible. Wouldn't it damage their sphincters?

>>17830210 (OP)
Humans eat the most meat. Adult male chimps have been confirmed to eat meat regularly, however, and all great apes eat bugs.

Human teeth can't easily crack coconuts, walnuts, pineapples or other hard husks. They also can't easily grind the grains and roots which are the staples of diets everywhere except those humans that are hypercarnivores (laplanders, inuit, traditional masai, etc). Tools were already being used before anatomicaly modern humans.

More caloric diets in general are associated with shorter life-expectancies. Meat happens to usually be part of high-calorie diets today.

Fire isn't recent; it is generally accepted that homo erectus made fires.

>>17830396
Poke salad has to be boiled and rinced 3 times before you can eat it, nasty stuff I won't eat it but it grows everywhere

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBfMLmNjFn4

>>17830210 (OP)
digestive system has difficulty digesting it. Meat also is linked with a shorter life expectancy.
completely false, educate yourself before posting retarded shit

Apes commonly hunt and prey on small ctitters they can catch.
https://youtu.be/16j5Hd35KgE?feature=shared

We left the trees and became bipedal. We left the forest for grasslands and learn how to hunt. Until animal protein took a bigger role in our diet because it was more advantageous in our new environment and lifestyle.

>>17830210 (OP)

Humans are adapted to eating meat similarly to how dogs are adapted to eat plant matter. They can do it and get advantages from being able to do it a lot but aren't especially good at it because of their deep evolutionary history.

>>17830210 (OP)
Humans evolved to eat prepared foods. We can't eat very much raw stuff. We have to process most of it in some way or we die. Our teeth match those dietary requirements.

>>17830874
>We can't eat very much raw stuff. We have to process most of it in some way or we die.
You mean like cooking it? There's lows of ways to eat raw meat that are still edible.

>>17830210 (OP)
First if all our teeth are fine for raw meat... if you exhibit atavism. Some people have really pointy and large canines it's just that once we started cooking food that was selected against for whatever reasons. There's a lot of reasons to believe earlier humans(still homo sapiens) were more carnivorous than we are today - for instance the presence and saturation of sugar digesting enzymes in our saliva has increased massively since the adoption of agriculture.
Also mind you that all the dietary science stuff is kinda bunk. You can find studies that eating and not eating meat causes cancer, shortens life, makes you fat etc. and its something that happens for every dietary choice you can imagine. Dieticians do very little controls of whether their test subjects actually follow the diets they were given and aren't cheating with sweets and shit so it's all worthless.

>>17830250
Eat a raw potato now. Pick up a small one, get ready for fever though.

>>17830210 (OP)
Most apes are vegetarians eating mostly fruits and tree sprouts, but there is an evolutionary benefit to eating meat and it probably EXACERBATED our rise to be vastly superior to our chimp/ape faggot cousins.

Eating meat essentially steals all the work the animal has provided for itself and gives it to the predator to take and utilize for itself, which means more protein and, in turn, energy to stimulate and develop our big brains. Doubly so when it's cooked, as cooked meat lowers the energy expenditure required for digestion, meaning even more energy is reserved. Probably one of our ancestors tried the meat off a scorched corpse in the aftermath of a forest fire, and we never returned to the point where we can no longer digest raw meat because we lost our digestive enzymes to do so.

Fuck those vegan eating pansy faggots, look at us now with our computers and high capacity intelligence to ponder the stars.

>>17830210 (OP)
>Is meat eating an evolutionary mystery?

The other Anons have said it as much, but there's no great mystery to meat: the literal moment it became available, our species obsessed over it, and that obsession predates even the Homo Erectus (the first arguably 'man ape') as seen in Chimpanzees: >>17830813 >>17830238

Meat maybe isn't 'technically' easier to digest than vegetation, what would be more correct to say is meat has more immediately available resource: fat, protein, vitamins, when you're eating liver or muscle tissue you get immediate access to sustenance. When you eat plant fiber, tubers, fruit, you're usually working through a lot of empty calories, water, inedible cellulose, etc. Fat and protein in particular are EXTREMELY important because of their relative scarcity and the fact that the human brain makes constant demands on your body of those two components (plus sugar).

For all the omnivore/herbivore/carnivore debate, the rut is humans are evolved to deliberately cook their food.
We don't have massive incisors or cutting teeth, our gut is too small to ferment vegetation, our gut is too long to get the most out of meat, our stomach acid isn't strong enough to kill intestinal parasites, we're a mess of incongruent intestinal details that don't make sense unless you cook your food. Which we do. *We need to.
*Except for fish. You can technically live off of raw fish (so long as you eat most of the fish: bones, organs, eyes, head). You'd be ugly desperate for carbohydrates, but you'd live.

>>17830210 (OP)
>and digestive system has difficulty digesting it.
no?