Fuel On the Fire

Science on NBCnews.com

“Sorry, vegans: Eating meat and cooking food made us human: High caloric intake enabled brains of our prehuman ancestors to grow dramatically”

By Christopher Wanjek

“The new studies demonstrate, respectively, that it would have been biologically implausible for humans to evolve such a large brain on a raw, vegan diet and that meat-eating was a crucial element of human evolution at least 1 million years before the dawn of humankind.”

The last part of this statement reflects the paleo-anemia reported upon earlier. The first part, the implausibility, is from a study at the University of Rio de Janeiro. Wanjek combined the two results for an appraisal of the findings.

I find it interesting that these reports consistently come out, yet there is so much resistance to the hypothesis that people stood up to carry weapons (and, subsequently, food).

The article also reports:  “Humans have exceptionally large, neuron-rich brains for our body size, while gorillas — three times more massive than humans — have smaller brains and three times fewer neurons. Why?

“The answer, it seems, is the gorillas' raw, vegan diet (devoid of animal protein), which requires hours upon hours of eating only plants to provide enough calories to support their mass.”

I know, I know; everyone wants to be a gentle vegetarian like, say, Hitler, but the truth is, it’s ruthless meat eaters like the Dali Lama who have led the species out of the jungle.

The good news is, we’re pretty sure, now, that the first restaurant was a barbecue hut.