Veganism/Vegetarianism

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^interesting thoughts. The atlatl and bow-and-arrow aren't so peaceful, but i suspect you're thinking of more primitive times than that. My one disagreement would be that, at that level of primitiveness, i doubt that the knapping technique was sophisticated enough to get a stone knife fine and sharp enough to peacefully slit an animal's throat.

Anybody know anything about Masaai hunters beyond the skipping aspect?
My knowledge of primitive hunting methods is more comprehensive in the area of seafood.

A few dozen millennia can make a HUGE difference. Entire new species can evolve over a mere 100 generations (link). The genetic changes that occured within the last 10,000 years account for a whopping 7% of the human genome (link). Among other things, we have evolved an enhanced ability to metabolize sugar since we became sedentary farmers (with the side effect of diabetes), as well as new immune functions. There are already humans with a greater resistance to HIV, a virus that didn't exist before the 1980s.

Besides, we did have millions of years to adapt to a high-protein diet. Homo habilis already scavenged for meat 2 million years ago. Homo erectus, who existed for ca. 1.5 million years, was a very efficient hunter who ate more meat than anything else. He specialized on elephants, so much so that Middle Eastern elephants were hunted to extinction by Eurasian H. erectus populations about 400,000 years ago (link).

When the first Homo sapiens was born about 200,000 years ago, his parents likely wrapped the baby in animal fur and fed the infant chunks of cooked elephant meat as soon as s/he was old enough to chew solid food. We are omnivore predators, descendants of another predatory species that in turn descended from scavengers. As a result, we are so specialized on meat that we can barely digest plant matter anymore unless it is cooked, and we have completely lost the ability to process cellulose. People who are trying to tell you that eating meat is unnatural and that we are primarily herbivores are either uneducated or in denial.

Humans were hunters for most of human history. Even after the rise of sedentary agriculture and nomadic pastoralism, our ancestors continued to hunt. Game was too good a food source to abandon it, especially in times of bad harvests. And we did not let the blood go to waste. It was (and still is) caught in buckets and processed into black pudding and blutwurst.

(Blood is a great source of sodium chloride btw. It contains more salt than meat and is easier to obtain than mined salt).



Our ancestors didn't need to separate single animals from a herd. They used spear throwers to wound and kill animals from a large distance. Other animals were caught in pit falls and then slowly stabbed to death with spears, especially large game such as elephants and mammoths.

Other hunting methods involved fire. Entire herds of mammoths were driven over cliffs with the help of torches. Early Australians simply burned down entire forests and then picked up all the crispy critters that lay on the ground There is evidence that humans completely changed the Australian landscape and drove several animal species to extinction by burning down forests.

Humans never felt queasy when it came to killing animals and each other, often in shockingly cruel ways. Just think of the animal and gladiator fights in Roman circus arenas, or execution methods such as impaling. In the Middle Ages, people burned cats alive for entertainment. Queen Elizabeth I of Britain had several cats burned alive as part of her coronation celebration. Psychopathy must have been a lot more common back then than it is today.

Last edited by CrazyCatLord on 02 Mar 2012, 3:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Well, something that has been discovered about our primitive ancestors is that they tended to devote themselves to one kind of tool at which they would become specialists. They didn't have a propensity for inventing new ones. Therefore, Homo Ergaster, for example, might have become an expert at getting a good stone knife out of a rock, but he would have been hopeless for inventing other tools. Too closed-minded.

In fact, the only reason our ancestors ever would have thought of gathering as closely together as the Ancient Sumerians would have been a sudden, dramatic shrinkage of their water supply. There is really no reason whatsoever for human beings to behave in that way, under normal circumstances. None. By all rights, we should be a species of scattered tribespeople right now. Frankly, I would have found it preferable. The sex would have been better.

Some people now have the ability to digest lactose into adulthood (rather than losing the lactase enzyme after breastfeeding infancy) but I haven't read evidence that we have evolved an enhanced ability to metabolize sugar. The anthropological evidence points to us not having evolved this change at all, thus diabetes and all the other Diseases of Civilization that come from overtaxing our sugar metabolism abilities. Paleolithic skeletons tend to be less diseased than Neolithic skeletons and less than our own (frequently arthritic) ones. Hunter-gatherer societies develop Diseases of Civilization about a generation after adopting agricultural starchy diets.

The fact that diabetes, cancer, arthritis and auto-immune disease are so rare in hunter-gatherer societies and so common in agricultural ones indicates that it is the agriculture itself. Agricultural diets are pretty carb-heavy. If hunter-gatherers get cancer/diabtes/auto immune diseases etc. after switching to carb- heavy agricultural diets, that indicates that our bodies haven't yet made evolutionary adaptions to dealing with all those carbs. They don't become more diseased than long term agriculturalists (which would indicate that the agriculturalists had adapted). They become as diseased, which indicates none of us have adapted.

True, but Homo ergaster was more of a scavenger than a hunter. Like H. habilis, he used sharpened stones to strip meat from bones and to break the bones open in order to eat the marrow. He might have thrown stones at predators to drive them away from their kill. Homo erectus, the first hunter, was a lot more inventive. He dug pit falls and stabbed his prey to death with spears. He also began to use fire (although some sources say that H. habilis already used fire to cook roots and tubers) and constructed clothing.

They* say that all the time. "Meat is death" etc.

(*When I talk about vegans in this post I am refering only to those that try to justice their bad taste in faux morality; If you are a vegan because you don't like eating meat or think it is healthier not to eat meat then please note this criticism is not against you)


As long as we strike out those who think that chicken is a vegetable.


I have never, in my whole life ever read a vegan say that they do not want to kill sentient beings.

I read a lot however about death. Suffering. The idea that meat rots the second it enters your gut. Religious arguments. And "animals are today's slaves" (Please ignore the actual human slaves that still exist).

Once sentience comes into place. There are a lot of animals that would hardly be considered to have a consciousness worth protecting. Is a worm really that much better than a robot? Is a chicken? Yet their ideal is "do not eat animals", including just about all animals.

In fact, the only time I remember sentience being brought upon to the discussion is Futurama.

Maybe it is the vegans I deal with, and it is all anecdotal. But really, I have heard way a lot of times things like "my spirit guides told me that in order to progress spiritually I have to stop feeding on the deaths of others". That I am very bitter against this whole thing.


This sounds a lot like retroactive abortion. You see? "What if you were eaten/aborted".

Fact is that if carnivorous aliens come and they are much advanced than us we wouldn't have any say. Our morality is don't kill humans, we have no reason to expect aliens to have a morality different than "don't kill people of our species" . Though I bet that if an aggressive alien race does come we would be lucky they liked our taste. That would at least give them a reason to keep us alive as a species. Yet I doubt it. I don't think we are very nutritive.



I would eat dolphin, if anything as a necessary side effect for eating tuna. In fact, are dolphins that smart if they get that close to tuna when humans are around. Is any animal that is easy to hunt and farm smart?

Not dog though. More than about intelligence I would say I care more about my capacity to bond with the animal. I don't care for aquatic life, as I don't even have access to sea. I have in the past dealt with chickens and cows when I was very young, and the truth is that they are excessively stupid. Hey, if they weren't they would have gained a use that depended on their capabilities (ie: cats hunt, dogs bark at strangers and thus we breed them to be useful; Dolphins can learn tricks) rather than the products you can extract from them Or would be so smart that we wouldn't be able to farm : Ie: lions. .

BTW Have you ever tasted octopus? Octopi are VERY intelligent. But they are delicious. Thank god they aren't mammals and thus nobody cares for octopi.


I also think that it is our responsibility as humans to eat fish so that those who don't die of mercury poisoning evolve a mercury immunity so that mankind does not lose the ability to eat fish.

I'm not sure. I get a strong sense that primitive man would have preferred taking on one solitary animal, rather than a herd of animals. The thing is, it wouldn't have damaged the interests of the herd one bit, since the animals most likely to be separated from the herd would most likely have been socially defeated or aging members of the herd, anyway.

Yeah, some of our ancestors could get pretty creative.

I frankly disagree. What I am thinking of here are cultures like the pre-Roman Celts or pre-European American Indians. I have a strong sense that our ancestors, if they were left to their own devices, tended to prefer a relatively easy-going life. I don't see our species as one that normally tends to seek out stress.

I think that, left to their own devices, human beings are really incredibly lazy animals that are content to walk an animal to death and then stab it casually with a sharpened stick. I think they only really get the bug to do otherwise when there is a sudden change in their environment, such as a contraction in their water supply or a change in the climate.

And I tend to assume that most of their fighting would have been on parallel with what modern youth tend to do naturally, anyway: I can't imagine human beings, under healthy circumstances, doing anything much differently from what the Ancient Greeks did and what modern youth do, which was to simply peck at each other basically for the fun of it.

It was mentioned in this article: http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/ ... on-heading



I've read that too, and it is confirmed by the fact that all diseases of civilization that you mentioned can be avoided by living on a high protein, low carb diet.

But I don't think that there were no evolutionary adaptions at all (lactose tolerance in adults only evolved in the last 3,000 years, as the above-linked article mentions), it's just that the adaption to our agricultural lifestyle is not yet complete. And since we manage to survive and procreate just fine thanks to modern medicine, no matter how much sugary and starchy cr*p we eat, further changes might not even be necessary.

If you can throw a spear with the help of an atlatl from 100 meters away, right into the middle of a grazing herd, why would you bother to separate an old and weak specimen? I'd rather kill a young and strong animal because it tastes much better.

Now imagine a group of 10-15 hunters, all armed with atlatls, who all throw their spears at the same time. Ten animals fall down, the rest of the herd runs off, each hunter carries a corpse back to the campsite. The meat that can't be eaten right away is salted and hung up to dry. With the advanced weapon technology of our neolithic ancestors, any less effective hunting method would have been a waste.

It is assumed that Eurasian and American humans hunted many species to extinction at the end of the last ice age (mammoths, several horse species, American camels, ground sloths etc.), which shows how highly effective and merciless the hunting methods of our ancestors were.



You might find this video interesting:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk[/youtube]

Our ancestors were a LOT more war-like and violent than we are today. Especially our tribal hunter-gatherer ancestors, who are often falsely romanticized as having lived in peaceful harmony with nature. They constantly engaged in wars and blood feuds with their neighbors.

Here is an interesting statistic. The bars at the top show the percentage of war victims in extant hunter-gatherer tribes, who live more or less like our neolithic ancestors did. As you can see, between 20 and 60% of all men are killed as the result of inter-tribal wars and feuds.



The short bar for the USA & Europe at the bottom includes the victims of both world wars btw. Despite our large-scale wars, we still live a lot more peaceful and non-violent than tribal people, some of which raid their neighbor tribes once a year. In many cases it's a preemptive strike. Humans are naturally paranoid. "Let's wipe them out before they raid us in the middle of the night".

This also used to be a very common procreative strategy, which is probably the selective mechanism behind this war-like behavior. Think "spoils of war". Frequent wars and raids = frequent rapes, which means more reproductive success. Finally, humans have practiced slavery for a very long time, and the slaves had to come from somewhere. Like you said, humans are lazy. In times before farming machinery and washing machines, raiding one's neighbors in order to take slaves was the only way to achieve a lazy life in luxury.

I didn't know about the research you cited. Good to know. I am on a high protein/low carb diet (Paleo diet) and am enjoying lower triglycerides and weight loss and am also marinating in the research making that seem like a good idea. It's given me some confirmation bias I feel like I've narrowly escaped Type II Diabetes by doing this so naturally I latch on to any research confirming it and ignore research pointing to adpatations for agriculture (except adult lactase, which I have, so I do enjoy dairy). Thanks for giving me a new article to read.

I've tried the paleolithic diet for a while, and my Crohn's disease got a lot better Some specialists think that pathogenic bacteria and yeasts in the inestinal flora are responsible for Crohn's, and those pathogenes thrive on carbohydrates. A low carb diet can starve them off.

I now eat moderate amounts of carbs again since I'm feeling better, but I'm careful not to eat too much sugar. I also greatly limit my fiber intake. If I get another Crohn's episode, I'll switch back to the paleo diet. When it gets really bad, I usually live off chicken soup and protein drinks for a while.

Convenience. The same reason many of our ancestors probably preferred getting their food by knocking squirrels off of trees with thrown rocks. Why? It was just more fun and less work to do, from their perspective. It was also a handy way to get a quick meal at certain times of year.

Besides, killing off the "youngest and strongest" is destroying good broodstock.

To my understanding, hunting large game is really a lot more involved than this and considerably more challenging, especially if one is working with relatively primitive weapons. A primitive spear doesn't work like a gun. It isn't a magic death stick.

More like careless. There was a reason that our ancestors eventually took to herding sheep and cattle and guarding them from other predators, rather than just killing them haphazardly. It made more sense to do. It was more efficient.

Our ancestors really had a fairly laid-back mindset. They really preferred sitting around telling stories, playing music and engaging in courtship over wasting unnecessary effort on hunting large game. If you were primitive Man, you would rather fight your next-door neighbor than an animal. Your neighbor helps you up and shakes your hand after he has knocked half your teeth out. The animal just mauls you until you are dead.

We also like going on long hunts in the wilderness with our friends. It's one of the oldest forms of male bonding. We go off with a rabble of our peers and some youth into the wilderness, and we track an interesting animal for a while. If we are lucky enough to make a few kills, we bring the carcasses home and cut off parts of them to keep as trophies. We still do this.

Youth today are actually fairly war-like. When they play competitive games against each other or even, as toddlers, "play tag, you're it," they are engaging in the same basic patterns of behavior we have always had. In Ancient Greece, gangs of hoplites armed with shields would charge at each other from two adjacent hills. Fatalities were common, but they weren't the point. The point was to beat the other gang at this "charge down the hill" game.

Not really as bloody as you would think. The Ancient Celts, for example, did clash frequently, but they tended to eventually sort out their differences in most cases. Many ancient Germanic tribes even took a ferocious glee in these feuds. I'm not saying it wasn't an occasionally bloody, violent existence. My point is, our ancestors who did this actually liked it that way. They liked it for the same reasons that we enjoy feuding with each other over whose NFL team deserves to go to the Superbowl. We get a jolly off of conflict. It's part of our nature.

I notice that they are still living as primitive savages, and we are not.

Due respect, but I do not accept 'US news' as a valid source for scientific information. The new scientist article does not show evolution of a new function, but alteration of extant functions; in addition, Cichlid fishes are notorious for speciation at the slightest alteration of habitat. Given that the vast majority of our genome (>90%) is still basically that of a chimpanzee, and we departed from chimpanzees considerably longer than 10 millenia ago, I find '7%' difficult to accept on the face of it. Differential sugar metabolism is a quickly-evolving trait, as it basically involves duplications of an extant gene rather than evolution of a new function; differential resistance to HIV is not HIV specific. Any time a new disease sweeps through a population, some individuals will be more resistant and some less based on pre-existing genetic factors.
The evolutionary issues most relevant to human diet and animals are the evolution within the last few thousand years of adult lactose tolerance in several dairying populations and the Milano gene that allows better tolerance for hyperlipidemia; both of these are very significant, the first in terms of allowing a new food source for adults at a time when calories were still scarce, and the latter because it allows people to eat high levels of animal fat without keeling over from heart attacks in middle age. None of the lactose tolerance genes have become fixed in the human population, and the Milano gene is still limited to a very small region of Italy despite its utility.


Again, Daily mail. In most hunter-gatherer societies, the majority of calories come from plant sources. Meat is a much-anticipated, much-appreciated supplemental source of protein and fat; it is even necessary in areas where sources of nuts and plant proteins are not readily available over the long term. However, meat has not been the major source of human calories for the majority of human existance.


Like we're good at digesting uncooked meat?
Fish, on the other hand...
Look at what I'm arguing: I'm not saying that meat is unnatural. I'm not saying that we're herbivores. I myself am an omnivore. I AM saying that bacon and eggs for breakfast, a Big Mac for lunch, and a steak for dinner is unnatural and, unless you have a very unusual gene set, will lead to some significant problems for most people by middle age.

You'd have to catch a lot of squirrels to feed your wife and two kids Not to forget the shaman and his wife and kids, the wife and kids of your buddy who was mauled by a cave bear, and a few oldtimers who are too old to hunt.

I also doubt that our pre-pastoralist ancestors thought in terms of breeding stock. They didn't breed animals, which makes it unlikely that they thought like breeders. They might have thought that gods or friendly spirits would constantly create new animal herds for them. Even in ancient Greece, philosophers like Aristotle speculated that some animals were instead spontaneously generated. In his History of Animals, he wrote: "Some spring from parent animals according to their kind, whilst others grow spontaneously and not from kindred stock".

We don't even know if paleolithic humans were aware of the link between sex and pregnancy. Even today, there are still primitive tribes who are blissfully unaware of such basic biology. Such as the Sambia people of Papua New Guinea, who believe that the purpose of sex is the transformation of semen into female breast milk. Who knows what kind of outlandish beliefs our ancestors might have held.



An atlatl is quite advanced (see below) and can be as deadly as a firearm in the hands of a skilled person. The spear is more of a large dart that is hurled at a speed of 150 km/h (93 mph) with far greater accuracy than a throwing spear. If it pierces a lung, it can knock a deer down through shock. Even if the the deer manages to get away, it will die through hemorrhaging shortly after.





I'm not sure that we know anything about the mindset of our distant ancestors. The high cultures that left us written records were already very civilized. But we do know for certain that they hunted large game, thanks to animal fossils at prehistoric camp and burial sites. Homo erectus was already a large game hunter (it doesn't get much larger than elephants), and Homo sapiens continued in the same tradition.



For contemporary Western hunters it's just entertainment. They don't have to track a herd over several days on an empty stomach, in a harsh Eurasian ice age climate, always on guard for large man-eating predators such as Arctodus or Eurasian cave lions, in the knowledge that the rest of their clan back at the camp or cave are also at risk of predator attacks or starvation. Paleolithic hunters couldn't afford to dally about and enjoy themselves. Hunting was a matter of life and death and had to be as efficient as possible.



Those hoplites were trained for a reason. Of course they didn't kill each other during games and training sessions, but they certainly did try to cause fatalities in the frequent wars between Greek city-states.



Yes, and that is the only reason that we can afford the easy-going, laid-back attitude that you attribute to our distant ancestors. They were in a very different situation, and I don't think that we can project our modern attitude and comfortable lifestyle onto them. We've grown up with Disney movies where all animals get along, whereas they lived in a world full of sudden violent death. I think they likely had a vastly different outlook on life.

often that's a melodramatic way of claiming (against the totality of evidence) that eating any meat at all will give you cancer and/or heart disease.

as I have mentioned several times, I'm an omnivore.


Having spent a lot of times on animal-rights forums arguing with lots of actual vegans, I have heard this quite a lot.


That's actually an issue that I have had with them: many of them consider a clam on the same level as a cow, despite the former's complete lack of a central nervous system.


If that's your experience with vegans, no wonder. Do you live in Hollywood? I live in Northern California, and I almost never hear people talking like that.


It's the other way around; for some reason, tuna like to hang around with pods of dolphins, so the humans look for dolphin pods (visible at the surface), and encircle the entire area with huge purse-seine nets. The dolphins are caught up with the tuna. As for how intelligent they are: they pass the mirror test (as do chimpanzees and elephants) so they're at least self-aware.

I wouldn't eat octopus, but thankfully they have equally tasty but less intelligent cousins (squid and cuttlefish).