Vegetarian, Vegan and Animal Rights
In reply to the discussion: Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians- Scientific American [View all]Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)But then they got plenty of vegetable matter out of the guts of the animals they killed (waste not want not!) just as the Inuit and other arctic people do when they take rabbits and caribou. basically they were carnivores because there was fuck-all else to eat where they lived.
H. sapiens is an opportunist. Effectively, we're scavengers, just like the other major plains primate, the baboon. Basically, you live out in the savannah, and "what's for dinner" is "whatever I find that is vaguely edible." Plants have the advantage of neither running away nor being surrounded by hyenas. So our ancestors probably ate a lot of plants (and probably contributed a fair share of ape meat to the diet of hyenas, to judge from remains in Africa and Asia)
The up points of the paleo diet are just common sense stuff - it limits your sugar and sodium intake quite a bit, and given how much sugar and salt is crammed into most of our food these days, this is something most people should be looking at doing on their own. But... It's easy to accomplish without pretending you're eating a caveman diet.
hell the premise is flawed because human physiology has changed quite a bit since the advent of agriculture; we've become more gracile, our jaws are smaller (thus the problem of wisdom teeth), our digestive tracts handle uncooked foods poorly (the "raw diet" people are wrong too, in other words) and at least among people descended from Old World agricultural societies, lactose tolerance is rampant.