As I ate a hamburger at Roxy’s, I wondered what caused human beings to take the route of eating meat and being mainly carnivores, opposed to many other animals that are herbivores, only eating plants, fruits and vegetables. As it turns out humans were not always meat-lovers.
The earliest ancestors of the human kind only feasted on vegetables, berries, and nuts. Therefore more food was needed to be consumed in order to fulfill the hunger of a full-grown human being. “You can’t have a large brain and big guts at the same time,” said Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, In addition to eating larger amounts, one would need a large gut to digest it all, so in the case of early humans, digestion was the energy hog of the body, thus not allowing large amounts of energy to go to the brain.
So a major dietary change somewhere around 2.3 million years ago marked a major turning point in the evolution of our species. States Aiello.
Research done on skulls of early hominids claim that regular meat consumption led to a change in the human skull, and a larger brain. Scientists argue that eating meat, which is filled with calories and fat, our ancestors could spend more energy building a bigger brain, and less energy on digestion. Early humans consumed lean meats, which added to a healthy and calorie-dense diet, which provided enough energy to power the brain’s expansion.
However, it is also proven that it was not meat alone that contributed to evolution. Another key introduction into the human diet was cooked vegetables. Raw foods are very nutritious but it is hard for the human body to get at the nutrients it needs without them being cooked. Also there is a lot of time and energy used in chewing raw vegetables, with cooked vegetables time is being saved and humans are getting more from them.
While I found the claim that meat caused increased human brain size very interesting I wondered if it suffered from a Texas Sharp Shooter Problem. Could the introduction of meat into a diet be a small subset of characteristics that lead to an increase of brain size and development? The articles make no mention of other possible things that contribute to enhanced brain development such as forms of communication, creation of tools, social complexity, and other things that cannot be examined in artifacts. I think it would be hasty to say that meat alone caused increase human brain size.
So, I have a heavy critique of claims saying it was only meat that lead to increased brain size. While I do think it played a role in the development of our species and increase of the brain, I don’t think it was the sole or even the strongest factor in brain enhancement.
In the end we may never fully know what was the biggest factor in human brain evolution was, and how much of a factor meat was in the equation. While it did play some roll, it is fair to say that meat did not make humans what they are today all by itself.
Sources:
http://www.npr.org/2010/08/02/128849908/food-for-thought-meat-based-diet-made-us-smarter
http://frugivoremag.com/2012/12/does-eating-meat-make-us-smarter-humans-science-thinks-so/
http://www.livescience.com/23671-eating-meat-made-us-human.html
With an article talking mainly about food and effects on the body I wondered how many types of food there are that we could eat and could be healthy for us that we don’t consume yet? What is edible that we don’t think is edible? Here is an article called 5 things you didn’t know you could eat. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-daily-meal/5-things-you-didnt-know-y_b_5059429.html
I also found out that dandelions snakes and ant eggs may have health value to humans.
I agree with you strongly when you say that other things could have lead to the development of the brain and thats exactly what I was thinking as I began to read this piece. I’m left wondering if people who consume less meat have slower brain development. What about vegans and vegetarians? Or is it just all humans as a whole in this day and age? Check out this interesting article I found about vegans and vegetarians. It shows that people who don’t eat meat have more of a chance of having nutritional deficiencies. It states,”A vegan diet during pregnancy also puts the fetal brain in danger of stunted development and reduced cognitive capacities later in life.” This makes me agree that meat is an important part of human diet, but brain development definitely has something to do with third variables.
This article reminds me of my high school history class where we had to study the evolution and speculate what inventions and adventures brought us to where we are today on the evolutionary trail. I found another study that suggests the introduction of meat into the diet allowed for more reproduction by shortening the breast-feeding period for mothers, which allowed them to move onto their next child (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120420105539.htm). The article says, “The model shows that the young of all species cease to suckle when their brains have reached a particular stage of development on the path from conception to full brain-size,” which was brought about, as you said, by eating meat. The debate previously was not over whether this change in breast-feeding occurred, but what caused this. The meat might have closed the discussion.