So, when I went to pet a tiger, I was told to wash up because they carry salmonella. Fun fact: big cats carry all sorts of strange bacteria because they eat raw meat and lick themselves.
Humans are the weirdest omnivore. The only reason we can eat meat is because 1-2 hundred million years of our homoerectus ancestors predigesting meat by cooking it.
At our evolutionary roots we are a tech bubble, but that tech, cooking, was discovered by a species that we would put in a zoo if it was still around.
> The only reason we can eat meat is because 1-2 hundred million years of our homoerectus ancestors predigesting meat by cooking it.
Not true. Chimps, our closest relative, eat meat which means our common ancestor also ate meat. So not only have humans been eating meat before cooking, our ancestors going back millions of years also ate meat. Also, human populations, like the inuit, eat meat without cooking. It's quite a task to start a fire in the frozen arctic. Anthony Bourdain had a show on the inuits a a while ago. And that's not including human populations throughout the world that eat insects/etc.
Cooking is what allowed humans to eat more meat and more efficiently, but it's absurd to claim humans only started eating meat after learning to cook.
Really "true herbivorism" is a bit of a myth - they can and will eat meat if they can. Deer eat meat and if you let chicks walk around cows they may decide to swallow them whole. Animal flesh is easier to digest and higher energy density.
Granted there is some can vs should such as lacking other adaptations to protect from hazards within. Turkey vulture stomachs for instance have acid stronger than car battery acid to digest carcasses safely.
it is not absurd. cooking would have helped ease the evolutionary transition to being able to digest meat. aside from that we are still very poor at digesting meat.
Almost all apes will eat meat, actually. It's not a primary part of their diet, but it's regular enough that it's been observed pervasively. And they digest it just fine.
It's true that we're weird because we cook it, but the weirdness isn't that it fundamentally changed our diet[1], but because it changed our gut. Our intestines shrunk a lot when we became cooking scavengers, to the point where we actually can't productively eat the diets that our ape ancestors did anymore, including their raw meat consumption.
[1] Though it did change our diet: we went from mostly-plant gatherers to mostly-meat scavengers, which required (or maybe the causality went the other way) that we leave the forest for grasslands where dead animals were larger and easier to find.
Insects are meat, yes. Are prawns/crab/lobster "meat"? Ocean arthropods are much closer to insects than they are to vertebrates. Obviously the question was about digestive suitability, not culinary aesthetics. And apes eat bugs, and can digest them just fine.
We evolved gut cells able to release Chlorhidric acid at PH=1. This stuff is sold to clean pipes and if you put a teeth in a glass at this PH it will slowly dissolve. We produce bottles of this stuff each day.
Cooking food helps to avoid other problems, but we are a species perfectly able to digest a chunk of raw animal muscle with just a little burp. This kind of specialized cells will not appear in a weekend just by starting to cook food.
But that adaptation is not a meat eating specialization. Stomach acids are rarely the adaptation, it is the digestive enzymes or gut bacteria that are the main drivers. And humans have none specialized for raw meat.
Cows can easily live and thrive on fishmeal but that does not mean the adaptations happened so cows can eat fishmeal.
I prefer to imagine that either there was no Cretaceous extinction, or that some Troodontids survived it, and went on to develop more useful forelimbs & human-like sentience. Imagine if we were reptile-bird people instead of primates.
100-200 million years is way too much to be supported by our scientific consensus:
Wikipedia on "Control of fire by early humans":
Claims for the earliest definitive evidence of control of fire by a member of Homo range from 1.7 to 0.2 million years ago (Mya). Evidence for the 'microscopic traces of wood ash' as controlled use of fire by Homo erectus, beginning some 1,000,000 years ago, has wide scholarly support. Flint blades burned in fires roughly 300,000 years ago were found near fossils of early but not entirely modern Homo sapiens in Morocco. Fire was used regularly and systematically by early modern humans to heat treat silcrete stone to increase its flake-ability for the purpose of toolmaking approximately 164,000 years ago at the South African site of Pinnacle Point. Evidence of widespread control of fire by anatomically modern humans dates to approximately 125,000 years ago.
Wikipedia on "Mammals":
Mammals diverged from reptiles and birds in the late Triassic, 201kk-227kk years ago.
Wikipedia on "Dinosaur":
They first appeared during the Triassic period, between 243 and 233.23 million years ago, although the exact origin and timing of the evolution of dinosaurs is the subject of active research
Humans eat plenty of uncooked meat. There's truly raw meat like suishi and sashimi, as well as cured meats that are never cooked, but made safe through the curing process.
A lot of cooking is just to avoid issues with bacteria and parasites.
If you have a large muscle and you keep it clean, the inside is especially clean. As soon as you cut it, the inside will be likely to get infected pretty quickly. That's why you don't make steak tartar from super market ground beef.
Similarly, you can eat raw fish (if you don't worry about parasites), but you pretty much want to eat them right out of the water. As soon as you cut it and leave it alone for a while, it can start to go off. This is, in fact, the origin of sushi. Originally, people in the interior of the country couldn't eat fish because you couldn't transport it without going off. Instead, they would pickle it. This pickling eventually made its way to the rice. Most Edo period sushi used pickled fish.
Been eating all sorts of low quality raw meat my whole life with no problems. (usually buy organic etc)
I find all the science about it contrary to the actual personal experience.
As for the point that cooking helps digestion in another comment, again it makes absolutely no sense to me. After eating 200g of sliced raw beef my stomach feels amazing, way better for digestion.
The more I cook meat, the more bloated I feel etc
(I've also ate raw chicken every now and then for 15 years with no problems)
Well cooking increases the available energy for one and that is separate from digestion in the regularity sense. The raw bits which would release more calories if cooked could be akin to fiber.
You also clearly have a microbiome accustomed to it for one and presumably the sources were sufficiently clean that doctors haven't found parasites or similar that cooking would address. I guess low quality means cut as opposed to "roadkill wildlife".
> Similarly, you can eat raw fish (if you don't worry about parasites), but you pretty much want to eat them right out of the water. As soon as you cut it and leave it alone for a while, it can start to go off.
Crucially, it is not aged at room temperature ;-). The original discussion was talking about the idea that technology has been used by humans to process and preserve fresh meat, making it more of a staple than it would have been thousands of years ago. Arguing that technology will allow you to age fresh fish, is kind of circular :-) Before the ready availability of ice, unsalted and unvinegared sea fish was very much a rarity if you were more than a days travel away from the sea in Japan.
Originally sushi started as picked fish. Then they got the idea to make blocks of pickled fish and picked rice (you can still buy this kind of sushi today in Japan). It really has only been in the last 150 years or so that sushi included raw, unprocessed fish, and only quite recently that it would have been available far away from the sea side.
Edit: I should qualify this as being in Honshu. I believe the Ainu people were eating raw fish for a long time - in the winter months, of course.
> Fun fact: big cats carry all sorts of strange bacteria because they eat raw meat and lick themselves.
Pretty much all wild animals have strange bacteria, parasites, etc. The reason why tigers have strange bacteria, parasites, etc is because they eat the herbivores that have bacteria, parasites, etc. The herbivores have bacteria, parasites, etc because they eat vegetation with bacteria and shit which has parasites/eggs on them.
Nature is a harsh place with lots of nasty things. Most humans had strange bacteria, parasites and all kind of nasty stuff until we separated ourselves from nature.
Didn't it also give us small pox, plague, and pretty much every other major disease? Living closely with animals and with each other (which farming allows and requires) created the grounds for all sorts of diseases right?
The article implies it might have done, not directly through the farming of plants directly but because humans settled in one place for agriculture instead of foraging.
Argiculture allowed us to build civilization that allowed you to post that on this forum. Salmonella kills 420 a year in US. Argiculture keeps hundreds of millions alive.
That's not exactly the same thing. Back when humans were hunter gatherers there was a lot more forest and a lot more fauna to eat. You also had a tribe that stuck with you for life. Modern inventions weren't known back then so you wouldn't even know how to miss them. There was less work to do and the work you did had real meaning. It's completely possible that life was better for the average person back then.
You're really wrong about this. Pack hunters, such as wolves, lions, or early humans, do affect local prey populations in temporary ways, but they don't destroy ecosystems. Agriculture does destroy ecosystems.
In fact, you'll survive longer and live better because the commercial agriculture will be mass growing monocultures, gradually reducing their soil quality (eventually making the soil barren), and providing less variety of vitamins and nutrients.
The ability to consider contradictory propositions often leads to insights. No one is asking you to give up your television. Rather, one might suggest that considering previously unknown drawbacks of obviously beneficial customs might lead to further improvements in those customs.
