Good example of media selection bias here, notice how this study is completely ignored by mainstream media:
https://imgur.com/a/lkaoClD
if it had said "Humans ate vegetables and little else" it would be on r/all now.
For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study
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Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study
#42Are you kidding me ... scientists proclaim one extreme, then the other:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ancient-humans-vegetarians-pa...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancest...
Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study
#43The actual paper was posted yesterday but got flagged. I don’t dispute any of the evidence but I do have 2 points to raise. 1. 95,000 years is plenty of time for adaptations in diet. The development of adult lactase for processing dairy was famously quick. The human diet is today well adapted to other foods without causing severe reactions. 2. The researchers note that our ancestors were primed to store fat for perio…
>Yet fasting is more limited in today’s society than perhaps ever before. Obesity may actually be an expression of Paleolithic fitness that was selected for in those times.
That's pretty much what people say about the keto diet.
Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study
#44This topic always becomes an ideological football in public discussions. Nevertheless...
The article completely misstates the purpose and findings of the paper, which isn't being helped by the authors here. The position taken in the paper is much less extreme. To summarize, they're staking out a position that middle paleolithic foraging groups were primarily carnivorous, but still had some level of dietary plant consumption.
The theoretical contribution is a bit more interesting, and the key line is in the abstract:
> We conclude that it is possible to reach a credible reconstruction of the HTL without relying on a simple analogy with recent hunter‐gatherers' diets.
The context here being that a perennial problem for the carnivorists has been that almost every foraging group we've documented ethnographically is highly omnivorous (see their rebuttel in 3.1). They're trying to get away from this problem by saying "all of that evidence is irrelevant because lower and middle paleolithic foragers were different". This is an understandable position in general, but specifically tying it to carnivorous dietary reconstructions requires running a gauntlet of theoretical objections, which is why the paper is essentially a long list of retorts to objections.
Personally, I don't find the argument convincing. There's a lot of weasel words to escape having to justify positions they really ought to littered throughout. It suggests the argument they're advocating isn't fully developed yet
e.g.:
> If genetic adaptations to USOs consumption were rather recent, it *suggests* that USOs did not previously comprise a large dietary component.
It's not a particularly well-argued paper, but this article is just a terrible summary of what it says.
Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study
#45Good example of media selection bias here, notice how this study is completely ignored by mainstream media: https://imgur.com/a/lkaoClD if it had said "Humans ate vegetables and little else" it would be on r/all now.
Don't worry, there were studies that showed the exact opposite LMAO: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ancient-humans-vegetarians-pa...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancest...
Don't pay too much attention to these "discoveries" being 100% true
Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study
#46My 2¢: in however many decades from now, we'll be about equally horrified by animal cruelty and by all the grain we used to eat.
Add to this list:
1. We allowed KIDS to use social media all day?? 2. We allowed the climate & oceans to get this bad??
Hard to predict the list of things our descendants will not approve of but looking backwards there's a huge list for our ancestors
Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study
#47Some strange comments in this thread- but this headline doesn’t make sense. Humans (homosapiens) first appeared about 300k years ago, so no we haven’t been eating only meat for 2 million years.
Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study
#48My father had a mid-life crisis in the mid 90's, and went from being an avid hunter and fisherman to being a hardcore animal rights vegan. (It was all precipitated by him meeting and dating a woman who worked at PETA) He was about 45 at the time. Within 2 years, his health had markedly declined. There are healthy vegan diets, but his was an unhealthy vegan diet. Despite no history of heart attacks on either his mothe…
There are some rare individuals whose diet needs ingredients found only in animal products. I have come across exactly 2 in my lifetime. That said, these people would still be vegan if they ate animal products. Veganism, by definition, seeks to exclude animal products "as far as is possible and practicable".
I don't know enough about your father's case but this might be more co-relation than causation, based on your facts. If going vegan was causing heart issues in people, we'd really know by now.
Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study
#49My father had a mid-life crisis in the mid 90's, and went from being an avid hunter and fisherman to being a hardcore animal rights vegan. (It was all precipitated by him meeting and dating a woman who worked at PETA) He was about 45 at the time. Within 2 years, his health had markedly declined. There are healthy vegan diets, but his was an unhealthy vegan diet. Despite no history of heart attacks on either his mothe…
I'm sorry that you had a bad experience with vegans, it seems like most people do lol. I was vegan for about a year, and I found it through self experimentation. I felt much lighter and energetic when I didn't eat meat. I did feel more burnt out mentally though. Through some research I started taking fish oil and feel much better now. Overall I'd say I feel great and would recommend my diet, especially considering my belief that how we treat animals is one of the biggest ethical dilemmas we are currently facing. May I ask what he ate? Considering that in the 90's there weren't many meat/dairy alternatives for vegans I am not sure how he developed a heart attack.
Re: For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study
#50This must be devastating news to the vegans and vegetarians they insist that meat is not natural.
Stone age humans are hardly the standard we should be aspiring for. The biggest two arguments for veganism are: 1. The horrific practises of the animal agriculture industry, which looks nothing like a chiseled hunter holding a bow 2. The devastating impact of the above on the environment Cavemen had neither of these issues.
While true, there are a lot of invasive (read: habitat destroying) animal species in North America (for example) and we got rid of most of the wolves, so hunting wild game should be a viable alternative to veganism for exactly those reasons.