Do Humans Need Meat?

Environmentalists encourage us to cut down on meat consumption in favor of vegetable foods that are less damaging to the environment. Given that our ancestors likely had plenty of meat in their diet, is going meatless a good idea? The History of Eating Meat Our chimpanzee-like ancestors were mostly vegetarian, judging from the diet of modern chimpanzees that subsist mainly on fruit, leaves, and nuts, with a rare morsel of hunted meat. After they left forests in favor of open grasslands, hominids likely increased the proportion of meat in their diet given that they would have encountered large herds of game animals. Initially, meat was consumed raw. About 200,000 years ago, the first hearths appeared and there is genetic evidence that the human brain began to burn a great deal of energy (allowing us to become considerably smarter. Cooking partially breaks down food making it easier to digest. Thanks to the culinary arts, the human gut had less work to do and became much smaller than the digestive system of a herbivorous ape. At this point, it seems that our ancestors were partly specialized as meat eaters although they likely continued to eat a wide range of vegetable foods. With increased energy use in the brain, we suddenly became a lot smarter. Key evidence for this is that our ancestors refined their toolkit into the efficient technology for killing at a distance that drove many large prey species into extinction around the globe (an event known as the Pleistocene ...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news