8 ms·

For 2M years, humans ate meat and little else: study

97 points by shadykiller 6y ago

DiabloD3 6y ago
Website down?
- imagine99 6y ago
  Works for me.
Google234 6y ago
This must be devastating news to the vegans and vegetarians they insist that meat is not natural.
- imagine99 6y ago
  I would not say devastating but it does certainly make you think. My wife is a vegetarian and I simply don't eat meat myself most of the time (I eat it very occasionally but don't like most meat for simple reasons of taste; I am completely apolitical and non-sectarian about it). I thought this gave us certain health benefits of course (I try to eat healthy) but I would obviously have to reconsider this if it was indeed true that eating more meat would be preferable with regard to health and mental performance. The article is not enough to convince me (I already commented about its questionable editorial quality) but I might look at the study itself and keep the subject on my radar anyway.
- yur3i__ 6y ago
  Possibly, until you consider that "natural" does not mean "better"
- toiletfuneral 6y ago
  its actually not devastating at all, but wow thats a great comment
- mhh__ 6y ago
  That sounds like a strawman
  - uoaei 6y ago
    It is. I have literally never heard this argument from any vegetarians or vegans.
    - forgetfulness 6y ago
      I think it was an old hippie thing, arguments from being closer to nature (rather than merely less harmful) were powerful back then. Today? The comparisons between wild and domestic crops are broadly circulated in the press and memes, premium mock meats are pushed by companies purporting to be high tech operations, there's no way you'd be spearing wild tofu swimming up the river because it doesn't exist.
      - uoaei 6y ago
        Haven't seen any of that either. Not saying no one says that but I have trouble believing that it is a persistent enough meme to be attributed so broadly to any social movements.
- forgetfulness 6y ago
  Most vegetarians are well aware that vegetarianism is made possible by civilization.
- moosey 6y ago
  I'm a vegan and I could give a crap how we ate 100k years ago. It has no bearing on building a contemporary diet conducive to health optimal health and pollution related outcomes. Given trophic levels, meat takes far more energy, land, and clean water to produce. Population studies repeatedly show that large amount of meat consumption leads to individual and population health issues. The same is true of sugar and alcohol, I readily admit, and assume kinds of meat don't require as much energy. We are fishing our oceans to extinction, destroying essential natural area to grow soy and corn which we then waste 90% of as cow feed. There is no amount of persuasion that could make me go back, unless the laws of physics are rewritten such that eating meat reduces the amount of atmospheric carbon.
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    Devil's advocate: Would you not be annoyed that your individual health is reduced so that the "commons" is healthier? I think part of the problem is people will not sacrifice their own health. It's mainly a "that sounds great, you go first" mindset. Thankfully with population growth slowing I think we're not nearly as bad off as you might think.
  - imagine99 6y ago
    > There is no amount of persuasion that could make me go back I don't really eat meat myself but I don't believe you, sorry. What about "if you ate meat you could increase your brain capacity by 500 cc and live a longer, healthier life". Would that make you go back? I bet it would. Even if it wouldn't, it would probably make the majority of people go back for sure. You cannot seriously make an argument that we as humans should potentially accept any diminished quality of life in regards to our mental capacity and health to "reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon". Again, as I said, I don't really eat meat and I'm all for saving the environment but arguments like that are the reason why it's so hard to convince "ordinary people" of the importance of sustainability and long-term thinking. The only alternative is only presented with these radical, self-destructive requirements. Why not pour the all the efforts of vegan evangelism into sustainable lab-grown meat? If it works, all problems solved, everybody can eat as much meat as they want (or not), the environment is saved and a lot of (potentially increased) brain capacity freed for other human improvement.
- aqme28 6y ago
  All 0 of them.
- nish1500 6y ago
  Stone age humans are hardly the standard we should be aspiring for. The biggest two arguments for veganism are: 1. The horrific practises of the animal agriculture industry, which looks nothing like a chiseled hunter holding a bow 2. The devastating impact of the above on the environment Cavemen had neither of these issues.
  - mkoubaa 6y ago
    While true, there are a lot of invasive (read: habitat destroying) animal species in North America (for example) and we got rid of most of the wolves, so hunting wild game should be a viable alternative to veganism for exactly those reasons.
    - hollerith 6y ago
      The fraction of the US population that can be fed by hunting is very small, though. There just arent that many wild animals.
      - mkoubaa 6y ago
        I don't dispute this, but until its saturated it has to be counted as an alternative.
  - mrkstu 6y ago
    Cavemen certainly had the second issue. Large mammals have been going extinct at the hand of man for a loooooong time.
  - throwawayboise 6y ago
    If I were an animal, I might rather be killed humanely in a slaughterhouse than clubbed and stabbed to death by a band of cavemen.
    - uxcolumbo 6y ago
      So I take it you’d also prefer your beak to be cut, because your captors are trying to stop your kind from pecking each other to death, because you are being held captive in extremely crammed living spaces to save money and to create more profit out of your life. Seriously, watch any factory farm video and I’m sure you wouldn’t want to wish that kind of life for yourself. But the good thing now is we neither have to club animals to death like cavemen or factory farm animals as our society does now. We can choose to be cruelty free.
- submeta 6y ago
  It‘s not about eating animals being un/natural. That’s not the (main) argument. It‘s about cruelty towards animals and about sustainability. Besides: Even if you claim us humans were carnivores for thousands of years, what does that prove? First off, humans are omnivores. And secondly, with this kind of argumentation we could say that for hundreds of years we had kingdoms (or slavery), so why have democracies (or universal human rights)? Humans do make progress, and the past does not prove or justify anything.
  - imagine99 6y ago
    > It‘s about cruelty towards animals and about sustainability. I think that should play absolutely no role in determining whether or not eating meat is better for you than a plant-based diet. It either is or isn't but animal cruelty and sustainability has nothing to do with that. IF we determine that more meat is better, we can totally focus and increase our efforts towards growing sustainable meat. This can be from sustainable farming or (more likely to be sustainable in the long-term) lab-grown alternatives. However, you cannot make this argument backwards, i.e. that we shouldn't eat meat because it was bad for the environment or the animals even if it was good for us. I get that some people think like that but it is not a "sustainable" argument for the majority of people to give up their potential health and brain capacity to save the environment or some chickens (if you want to take this to a hypothetical extreme). Note that I say this a "de facto" vegetarian.
    - PurpleFoxy 6y ago
      How is it not reasonable to give up some things for the environment? Your health isn’t going to be doing so well if you don’t have a livable environment
      - imagine99 6y ago
        Can I encourage you to think this through to the end because I see this argument so often. Never in human history has self-imposed restraint with regard to scientific exploration, possibilities and development given us any real advantage. The loser will be the one who practices that restraint of scientific exploration (not develop nuclear power, not go to space, not develop certain vaccines from stem cells). He will die out. The winner will be the one who ignores it, kills the other with atom bombs, has nuclear power, vaccines, super-soldiers and space habitats. And if the winner then comes to the conclusion that he might dedicate some of his energy and over-engineered super-brains to saving Earth and the environment, again, he will have a much bigger chance of success at this, too. You may well find this reprehensible but it is certainly axiomatic for humanity as a whole. As a whole, people will never accept something in the long-term that requires measurable and hard sacrifices from them. For a current example just look at how hard it is to convince people to stay in lockdown (and those benefits are arguably much more obvious and immediate than "effects on the environment"). The answer to your second statement is more obvious still: If my health (and brain capacity, for arguments sake) is increased, I will have the ability to solve the other problems in the way that we humans traditionally solve problems outside of dogmatic and religious spaces: By scientific advancement. Why should potentially limit my brain capacity and health to have a shorter lifespan in a potentially slightly more liveable environment? That makes no sense, sorry. Only if we all (including scientists, investors and innovators) live longer and healthier lives, then there will be both incentive and opportunity to solve problems of the environment in a way that does not require personal sacrifice (think carbon capture, lab-grown meat, becoming an interplanetary species and growing meat on asteroids if you want to take it that far) ;-)
maw 6y ago
My 2¢: in however many decades from now, we'll be about equally horrified by animal cruelty and by all the grain we used to eat.
- ddorian43 6y ago
  Doubt being "horrified" on the animal cruelty. We're pretty good to dehumanize other animals except pets I believe.
  - dyingkneepad 6y ago
    People weren't horrified about cruelty against slaves not so long ago, and look at where we are now. I bet most people of that era would not believe we'd ever reach the point we got now. I bet many would even be willing to die on wars for over their now-completely-unacceptable ethic standards.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Actually they were. Peers of the Spartans were horrified about how bad they treated their slaves - even though they themselves owned slaves.
    - Daho0n 6y ago
      That is a pretty bad example as what we have today is not much better, it's just hidden in poor countries. "Being horrified" is something most say they are and then they go buy clothes made by people living a life as bad as slaves used to. https://slaveryfootprint.org/ https://slaveryfootprint.org/
- VoodooJuJu 6y ago
  If you're not eating meat and you're not eating grain, where are you getting all of your energy from?
  - mft_ 6y ago
    Legumes, vegetables, and fruit?
femiagbabiaka 6y ago
Link to the actual study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.24247 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.24247
- microtherion 6y ago
  There seem to be some rather dubious assumptions there, notably that hunting is a more efficient way of acquiring nutrition than gathering. I'm not a specialist in the field, but my understanding was the opposite. And sentences such as "[...] baboons [...] devote almost all their daylight hours to feeding [...] while adult Ache and Hadza men spend only a third of the day in food acquisition, preparation, and feeding"? I probably wouldn't go there… It's kind of convenient that one of the author appears to be selling an app that has just the right diet for the modern troglodyte: https://nutrita.app/author/raphael-sirtoli/ https://nutrita.app/author/raphael-sirtoli/
  - m000 6y ago
    For prehistoric nomads hunting would definitely be a more reliable source of food. Think of winters, when there's little to gather but you can still hunt a mammoth or some other large prey. This way, you take advantage of the muscle/fat the animal built while eating stuff you can't eat. So, I could see prehistoric nomads being mostly carnivores for a whole season. Which would also leave enough evidence on their remains. But I agree that the authors seem to have a bias/motive (entrepreneurial and academic) to overstress the importance of eating meat, perhaps cherry-picking on the available evidence.
    - AlotOfReading 6y ago
      Hunting small game is reasonably reliable. Hunting primarily big game, as the study is suggests, is the textbook example of unreliable high risk, high reward strategies we teach undergrads about. What modern human foragers often do is exploit a huge variety of strategies all at once. They're also highly opportunistic and social mechanisms are used to distribute the successes across a large number of people. For instance, if a bunch of Hadza hunters come across a beehive full of honey, they'll stop hunting and eat it. Such finds end up being a significant source of calories for the Hadza, but the study's argument is that this sort of omnivorousness is a recent innovation.
imagine99 6y ago
Well, regardless of the topic at hand (the point about brain-size shrinking when eating plants certainly sounds interesting), already the infographics are full of obvious typos ("Domesticsted", "Larg prey") which suggests shoddy editing at least. While that made me chuckle a bit in the context of "brain size" it also leads me to not giving to much credence to the quality of the rest of the text (which I cannot really judge on its merits because it's outside my area of expertise). I do tend to refer to the Gell-Mann effect [1] in instances such as this though... However, if there's anyone here who has expertise in this area, I would certainly be very interested to hear what they think. Let me ask more plainly: Should we all ditch salad and go back to eating "bone marrow and brains" tomorrow? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
- danr4 6y ago
  I'd be very surprised if there was one answer to "what should humans eat?". It probably depends on so many factors unknown to scientists, that the best way is to just try different diets until you feel good.
- mkoubaa 6y ago
  I didn't see brain size linked directly to diet here, only saw it on the infographic. In another study recently, I saw brain size linked to the challenge of hunting large animals (like cave bears and mammoths)
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    That’s interesting because I’ve also read that animal brain size is positively correlated with group communication and social network size. In order for early humans to successfully hunt large animals, especially large predators, I would imagine it would take quite a lot of group communication and coordination.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  I think the answer is pretty simple: we should eat varied and follow the seasons. That many get pretty sick by going into ketosis shows how unhealthy we are. A healthy human can switch between a diet with lots of carbohydrates and one with few without problems. I'd posit that more than 99% of humans cannot switch between fat burning and glucose burning without getting sick because of withdrawal symptoms.
danr4 6y ago
In 2019, age 30, I ate only red meat (and a little fish) for about 8 months. It was by far the peak of my physical condition. Better sleep, stronger workouts, no mid-day grogginess. Blood test results were as best as one could hope for, apart for the debatable "high cholesterol". Unfortunately a couple of trips abroad (damn Italy) and I got back to a more standard diet. Have put on 15kg since. I've been longing to return to it, but the quality and price of meat here in Israel makes it so hard.
- femiagbabiaka 6y ago
  IGF-1 is a hell of a drug. It will be interesting to see some anecdotal reports from current carnivore diet followers in a few decades.
  - JPKab 6y ago
    Why do we have to wait for anecdotal reports? There are numerous people who have followed this diet for decades in the US, but more importantly, there are entire tribes of humans who have eaten carnivorous diets for thousands of years. How much plant-based foods do you think the average Inuit consumes?
    - femiagbabiaka 6y ago
      1. Bigger groups === more and better data. I didn't know anyone growing up who was interested in ketogenic or carnivorous diets, now it's much more common. 2. Huge difference between the diet of a westerner following carnivore and traditional tribal carnivorous diets 3. The Inuits weren't particularly healthy, I'm not sure why their diet matters: https://www.leoandlongevity.com/post/inuit-health https://www.leoandlongevity.com/post/inuit-health 4. And most importantly, there's a lot of research showing that high levels of IGF-1 associated with diets high in red meat are not good for longevity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjSl4n_KdOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjSl4n_KdOY
- JPKab 6y ago
  That's a bummer about the meat quality in Israel. I'm guessing it's just super expensive???
JPKab 6y ago
My father had a mid-life crisis in the mid 90's, and went from being an avid hunter and fisherman to being a hardcore animal rights vegan. (It was all precipitated by him meeting and dating a woman who worked at PETA) He was about 45 at the time. Within 2 years, his health had markedly declined. There are healthy vegan diets, but his was an unhealthy vegan diet. Despite no history of heart attacks on either his mother or father's side, he developed heart disease in his early 50s. This was where I first became aware of the scientific fraud that is the lipid hypothesis, and how wrong it is. The Framinham Heart Study has been a source of data that actively refutes the lipid hypothesis for decades, but the nutritional science community has similar issues to many other organizations with tenured experts whose entire reputation is tied to their theories being right. My experience dealing with militant vegans is that there is no amount or type of evidence that would convince them that a diet that includes ANY amount of animal products is healthy. It's a religion to them, and that's that. I was a teen when he converted to veganism, and my encounters with these various activists made me absolutely despise them and their ilk. Truly contemptible people in general, who fully believe the ends justify any means.
- raffraffraff 6y ago
  I've been vegetarian for 25 years. I'm male, 45 years old, my resting heart rate is around 50, and I can run 10km in under 50 minutes (and I do this about 3 times per week). Scroll back 5 years. My wife and I decided to become vegan (for various reasons - carbon footprint, animal welfare, all that jazz). Having been healthy vegetarians for about 20 years, it should have been easy, but regardless, we were meticulous. In fact, not being the "religious" type, and having found out that bi-valves (oysters, clams, scallops etc) don't have the where-with-all to feel pain, I added them to my diet. We just cut out all eggs and dairy. Now, I can't swear that going vegan caused my health problems, but about a year after going vegan, my overall "vitality" had dropped (I felt tired, but kept up frequent exercise). But the biggest issue was that I couldn't shake off a cold. It would start with the usual sniffle, and within a few days I have a temperature and my lungs would be infected. I went through about a year of constant on-and-off infections. At the worst point, I had two straight months of infection, seemed to shake off for a few weeks, and got it back again for another two months. I was miserable. I was worried it was something really bad like lung cancer. The doctor prescribed me two types of inhaler, lots of antibiotics and told me I had adult onset asthma. The inhalers helped me manage things, but I really just felt like I was keeping another infection at bay all the time. I went back on eggs and a small amount of dairy. A few months later I was back running. I haven't had a single problem since. 5 years without inhalers. I have no idea what really caused my issues. My wife developed an intolerance to soy during our veganism. If she eats tofu for a few days, her skin gets itchy and she eventually get a flare up of rosacea (which btw, she had for months until she figured out the soy connection, but it took weeks after cutting out soy and taking meds before it completely cleared up). The biggest issue I have with a pure vegan diet isn't just cutting out foods, it's the addition of huge amounts of stuff that you normally wouldn't eat in such high amounts (nut milk, nut butter, nut cheese, nut burgers... soy in everything) I have encountered these militant vegans too. I don't get into arguments, I just say "it's not for me".
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
The argument about tools indicating a change in diet: perhaps the baskets and pounders used for vegetable diets didn't survive as long as the flint spearheads. They could seem to 'disappear' in the historical record, simply because they leave no recognizable long-term evidence.
twobitshifter 6y ago
The actual paper was posted yesterday but got flagged. I don’t dispute any of the evidence but I do have 2 points to raise. 1. 95,000 years is plenty of time for adaptations in diet. The development of adult lactase for processing dairy was famously quick. The human diet is today well adapted to other foods without causing severe reactions. 2. The researchers note that our ancestors were primed to store fat for periods of fasting after consuming large prey. The evidence of this is that our fat reserves are larger than today’s carnivores. Yet fasting is more limited in today’s society than perhaps ever before. Obesity may actually be an expression of Paleolithic fitness that was selected for in those times.
- mkoubaa 6y ago
  I would say 95,000 years is plenty of time to begin to develop adaptations in diet. If as a species our survival was still threatened by starvation for another 100k years we might see more adaptation towards meatless, but that seems unlikely.
  - antisthenes 6y ago
    It depends how much of an advantage a certain diet brought from a procreative standpoint. If milk drinkers were the only group who could obtain the necessary amount of calories for bearing offspring and sustained existence, then the adaptation would happy much more quickly. Perhaps even as quick as several generations.
    - mkoubaa 6y ago
      It's not quite as binary as that. Milk tolerance ranges from poison to healthy and everything in between.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  >Yet fasting is more limited in today’s society than perhaps ever before. Obesity may actually be an expression of Paleolithic fitness that was selected for in those times. That's pretty much what people say about the keto diet.
proc0 6y ago
Not just humans..., I think subsisting and surviving by taking from the environment is what life has done since the beginning. Our success at doing so is now the problem, because of scale, but I think natural selection requires the competition, otherwise I think animals would just be blob-like. Even then we can imagine eventually all blobs multiply and cover the planet, and there would be no choice but to compete at that point, forcing some blobs to evolve into predators, and the others to evolve evasion tactics, etc. That said, it would be great to move away from mass farming, even if it means changing diet.
1experience 6y ago
Good example of media selection bias here, notice how this study is completely ignored by mainstream media: https://imgur.com/a/lkaoClD https://imgur.com/a/lkaoClD if it had said "Humans ate vegetables and little else" it would be on r/all now.
- EGreg 6y ago
  Don't worry, there were studies that showed the exact opposite LMAO: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ancient-humans-vegetarians-paleolithic-diet_n_1695228 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ancient-humans-vegetarians-pa... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancest... Don't pay too much attention to these "discoveries" being 100% true
- m000 6y ago
  There is a media bias here, but it's not what you're implying. It is Israeli media picking up a story promoted by Israeli scientists. This is common practice for media in EMEA countries. But most importantly, you're overlooking the authors' bias. 1st/last authors seem to be making an academic career on proving that humans are carnivores. 2nd author is a self-confessed fan of low-carb diets, and listed as the founder of a company offering a nutrition tracker based on the same principles. Not exactly an unbiased trio. And without the hinges of peer-review that would stop them from making wide claims, I would skip the news article altogether. And not being unbiased is probably why you won't see their research on international media, that would arguably be a bit more picky, having a wider selection of science stories to choose from.
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    While I don't disagree with your point I don't think you can state that someone being a fan of a low carb diet is not unbiased unless you also say that every single other piece of research on this topic is also biased if it's by someone not "being a fan of low carb diets" (IE. eating like almost everyone does).
EGreg 6y ago
Are you kidding me ... scientists proclaim one extreme, then the other: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ancient-humans-vegetarians-paleolithic-diet_n_1695228 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ancient-humans-vegetarians-pa... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancest...
- imagine99 6y ago
  I agree with your irritation (I too would like more authoritative information about this, as it is outside my expertise). However, with regard to the links you posted, I think these are actually the same source and and the HuffPost "article" is just reposted content, not a second opinion on that other viewpoint.
AlotOfReading 6y ago
This topic always becomes an ideological football in public discussions. Nevertheless... The article completely misstates the purpose and findings of the paper, which isn't being helped by the authors here. The position taken in the paper is much less extreme. To summarize, they're staking out a position that middle paleolithic foraging groups were primarily carnivorous, but still had some level of dietary plant consumption. The theoretical contribution is a bit more interesting, and the key line is in the abstract: > We conclude that it is possible to reach a credible reconstruction of the HTL without relying on a simple analogy with recent hunter‐gatherers' diets. The context here being that a perennial problem for the carnivorists has been that almost every foraging group we've documented ethnographically is highly omnivorous (see their rebuttel in 3.1). They're trying to get away from this problem by saying "all of that evidence is irrelevant because lower and middle paleolithic foragers were different". This is an understandable position in general, but specifically tying it to carnivorous dietary reconstructions requires running a gauntlet of theoretical objections, which is why the paper is essentially a long list of retorts to objections. Personally, I don't find the argument convincing. There's a lot of weasel words to escape having to justify positions they really ought to littered throughout. It suggests the argument they're advocating isn't fully developed yet e.g.: > If genetic adaptations to USOs consumption were rather recent, it *suggests* that USOs did not previously comprise a large dietary component. It's not a particularly well-argued paper, but this article is just a terrible summary of what it says.
- mpweiher 6y ago
  > completely misstates the purpose and findings...primarily carnivorous, but still had some level of dietary plant consumption. That's exactly what the article says, so not sure why you're saying it completely misstates the purpose and findings.
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    Are you saying that your initial reaction to the headline ("For 2 million years, humans ate meat and little else") and first line ("...hyper-carnivorous “apex predators” that ate mostly the meat of large animals") was to note the obvious corollary that "There is little argument that Paleolithic diets were higher in plants than recent Polar diets..."? Since the whole point of science communications is communicating nuanced ideas without perpetuating misunderstandings, the fact that discussions here are reflecting the former rather than the latter is what I mean.
albertgoeswoof 6y ago
Some strange comments in this thread- but this headline doesn’t make sense. Humans (homosapiens) first appeared about 300k years ago, so no we haven’t been eating only meat for 2 million years.
- Vadoff 6y ago
  Probably implied that it extends to the ancestors of humans.
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  Presumably they are including predecessor hominids.
uxcolumbo 6y ago
Back then we hunted or scavenged. Those non-human animals we hunted were living freely and we lived in more harmony with the natural world. Now we breed, torture and kill millions and millions of non-human animals and in the process destroy our biosphere [0] We can live perfectly healthy on a plant-based diet - see the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine: https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition We have the brains & technology to create food that is healthy and nutritious without having to continue to support the destructive and cruel factory farm industry. So the question should be how come we accept this immense cruelty and destruction caused by the factory farm industry? Damian Mander - founder of International Anti-Poaching Foundation put it best: https://youtu.be/BUMGBwgGYWw?t=100 https://youtu.be/BUMGBwgGYWw?t=100 ---- [0] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-06-01-new-estimates-environmental-cost-food https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-06-01-new-estimates-environme... https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/ https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...
anotherevan 6y ago
“Vegetarian – that’s an old Indian word meaning ‘lousy hunter’.” — Andy Rooney
__initbrian__ 6y ago
Is it common to refer to all hominids (here: homo habilis and homo erectus) as humans? For some reason I thought the term human was limited to homo sapiens (195k years old) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human

97 points by shadykiller 6y ago

DiabloD3 6y ago

Website down?

imagine99 6y ago
Works for me.

Google234 6y ago

This must be devastating news to the vegans and vegetarians they insist that meat is not natural.

imagine99 6y ago
I would not say devastating but it does certainly make you think. My wife is a vegetarian and I simply don't eat meat myself most of the time (I eat it very occasionally but don't like most meat for simple reasons of taste; I am completely apolitical and non-sectarian about it). I thought this gave us certain health benefits of course (I try to eat healthy) but I would obviously have to reconsider this if it was indeed true that eating more meat would be preferable with regard to health and mental performance. The article is not enough to convince me (I already commented about its questionable editorial quality) but I might look at the study itself and keep the subject on my radar anyway.
yur3i__ 6y ago
Possibly, until you consider that "natural" does not mean "better"
toiletfuneral 6y ago
its actually not devastating at all, but wow thats a great comment
mhh__ 6y ago
That sounds like a strawman
- uoaei 6y ago
  It is. I have literally never heard this argument from any vegetarians or vegans.
  - forgetfulness 6y ago
    I think it was an old hippie thing, arguments from being closer to nature (rather than merely less harmful) were powerful back then. Today? The comparisons between wild and domestic crops are broadly circulated in the press and memes, premium mock meats are pushed by companies purporting to be high tech operations, there's no way you'd be spearing wild tofu swimming up the river because it doesn't exist.
    - uoaei 6y ago
      Haven't seen any of that either. Not saying no one says that but I have trouble believing that it is a persistent enough meme to be attributed so broadly to any social movements.
forgetfulness 6y ago
Most vegetarians are well aware that vegetarianism is made possible by civilization.
moosey 6y ago
I'm a vegan and I could give a crap how we ate 100k years ago. It has no bearing on building a contemporary diet conducive to health optimal health and pollution related outcomes. Given trophic levels, meat takes far more energy, land, and clean water to produce. Population studies repeatedly show that large amount of meat consumption leads to individual and population health issues. The same is true of sugar and alcohol, I readily admit, and assume kinds of meat don't require as much energy. We are fishing our oceans to extinction, destroying essential natural area to grow soy and corn which we then waste 90% of as cow feed. There is no amount of persuasion that could make me go back, unless the laws of physics are rewritten such that eating meat reduces the amount of atmospheric carbon.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  Devil's advocate: Would you not be annoyed that your individual health is reduced so that the "commons" is healthier? I think part of the problem is people will not sacrifice their own health. It's mainly a "that sounds great, you go first" mindset. Thankfully with population growth slowing I think we're not nearly as bad off as you might think.
- imagine99 6y ago
  > There is no amount of persuasion that could make me go back I don't really eat meat myself but I don't believe you, sorry. What about "if you ate meat you could increase your brain capacity by 500 cc and live a longer, healthier life". Would that make you go back? I bet it would. Even if it wouldn't, it would probably make the majority of people go back for sure. You cannot seriously make an argument that we as humans should potentially accept any diminished quality of life in regards to our mental capacity and health to "reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon". Again, as I said, I don't really eat meat and I'm all for saving the environment but arguments like that are the reason why it's so hard to convince "ordinary people" of the importance of sustainability and long-term thinking. The only alternative is only presented with these radical, self-destructive requirements. Why not pour the all the efforts of vegan evangelism into sustainable lab-grown meat? If it works, all problems solved, everybody can eat as much meat as they want (or not), the environment is saved and a lot of (potentially increased) brain capacity freed for other human improvement.
aqme28 6y ago
All 0 of them.
nish1500 6y ago
Stone age humans are hardly the standard we should be aspiring for. The biggest two arguments for veganism are: 1. The horrific practises of the animal agriculture industry, which looks nothing like a chiseled hunter holding a bow 2. The devastating impact of the above on the environment Cavemen had neither of these issues.
- mkoubaa 6y ago
  While true, there are a lot of invasive (read: habitat destroying) animal species in North America (for example) and we got rid of most of the wolves, so hunting wild game should be a viable alternative to veganism for exactly those reasons.
  - hollerith 6y ago
    The fraction of the US population that can be fed by hunting is very small, though. There just arent that many wild animals.
    - mkoubaa 6y ago
      I don't dispute this, but until its saturated it has to be counted as an alternative.
- mrkstu 6y ago
  Cavemen certainly had the second issue. Large mammals have been going extinct at the hand of man for a loooooong time.
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  If I were an animal, I might rather be killed humanely in a slaughterhouse than clubbed and stabbed to death by a band of cavemen.
  - uxcolumbo 6y ago
    So I take it you’d also prefer your beak to be cut, because your captors are trying to stop your kind from pecking each other to death, because you are being held captive in extremely crammed living spaces to save money and to create more profit out of your life. Seriously, watch any factory farm video and I’m sure you wouldn’t want to wish that kind of life for yourself. But the good thing now is we neither have to club animals to death like cavemen or factory farm animals as our society does now. We can choose to be cruelty free.
submeta 6y ago
It‘s not about eating animals being un/natural. That’s not the (main) argument. It‘s about cruelty towards animals and about sustainability. Besides: Even if you claim us humans were carnivores for thousands of years, what does that prove? First off, humans are omnivores. And secondly, with this kind of argumentation we could say that for hundreds of years we had kingdoms (or slavery), so why have democracies (or universal human rights)? Humans do make progress, and the past does not prove or justify anything.
- imagine99 6y ago
  > It‘s about cruelty towards animals and about sustainability. I think that should play absolutely no role in determining whether or not eating meat is better for you than a plant-based diet. It either is or isn't but animal cruelty and sustainability has nothing to do with that. IF we determine that more meat is better, we can totally focus and increase our efforts towards growing sustainable meat. This can be from sustainable farming or (more likely to be sustainable in the long-term) lab-grown alternatives. However, you cannot make this argument backwards, i.e. that we shouldn't eat meat because it was bad for the environment or the animals even if it was good for us. I get that some people think like that but it is not a "sustainable" argument for the majority of people to give up their potential health and brain capacity to save the environment or some chickens (if you want to take this to a hypothetical extreme). Note that I say this a "de facto" vegetarian.
  - PurpleFoxy 6y ago
    How is it not reasonable to give up some things for the environment? Your health isn’t going to be doing so well if you don’t have a livable environment
    - imagine99 6y ago
      Can I encourage you to think this through to the end because I see this argument so often. Never in human history has self-imposed restraint with regard to scientific exploration, possibilities and development given us any real advantage. The loser will be the one who practices that restraint of scientific exploration (not develop nuclear power, not go to space, not develop certain vaccines from stem cells). He will die out. The winner will be the one who ignores it, kills the other with atom bombs, has nuclear power, vaccines, super-soldiers and space habitats. And if the winner then comes to the conclusion that he might dedicate some of his energy and over-engineered super-brains to saving Earth and the environment, again, he will have a much bigger chance of success at this, too. You may well find this reprehensible but it is certainly axiomatic for humanity as a whole. As a whole, people will never accept something in the long-term that requires measurable and hard sacrifices from them. For a current example just look at how hard it is to convince people to stay in lockdown (and those benefits are arguably much more obvious and immediate than "effects on the environment"). The answer to your second statement is more obvious still: If my health (and brain capacity, for arguments sake) is increased, I will have the ability to solve the other problems in the way that we humans traditionally solve problems outside of dogmatic and religious spaces: By scientific advancement. Why should potentially limit my brain capacity and health to have a shorter lifespan in a potentially slightly more liveable environment? That makes no sense, sorry. Only if we all (including scientists, investors and innovators) live longer and healthier lives, then there will be both incentive and opportunity to solve problems of the environment in a way that does not require personal sacrifice (think carbon capture, lab-grown meat, becoming an interplanetary species and growing meat on asteroids if you want to take it that far) ;-)

maw 6y ago

My 2¢: in however many decades from now, we'll be about equally horrified by animal cruelty and by all the grain we used to eat.

ddorian43 6y ago
Doubt being "horrified" on the animal cruelty. We're pretty good to dehumanize other animals except pets I believe.
- dyingkneepad 6y ago
  People weren't horrified about cruelty against slaves not so long ago, and look at where we are now. I bet most people of that era would not believe we'd ever reach the point we got now. I bet many would even be willing to die on wars for over their now-completely-unacceptable ethic standards.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Actually they were. Peers of the Spartans were horrified about how bad they treated their slaves - even though they themselves owned slaves.
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    That is a pretty bad example as what we have today is not much better, it's just hidden in poor countries. "Being horrified" is something most say they are and then they go buy clothes made by people living a life as bad as slaves used to. https://slaveryfootprint.org/ https://slaveryfootprint.org/
VoodooJuJu 6y ago
If you're not eating meat and you're not eating grain, where are you getting all of your energy from?
- mft_ 6y ago
  Legumes, vegetables, and fruit?

femiagbabiaka 6y ago

Link to the actual study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.24247 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.24247

microtherion 6y ago
There seem to be some rather dubious assumptions there, notably that hunting is a more efficient way of acquiring nutrition than gathering. I'm not a specialist in the field, but my understanding was the opposite. And sentences such as "[...] baboons [...] devote almost all their daylight hours to feeding [...] while adult Ache and Hadza men spend only a third of the day in food acquisition, preparation, and feeding"? I probably wouldn't go there… It's kind of convenient that one of the author appears to be selling an app that has just the right diet for the modern troglodyte: https://nutrita.app/author/raphael-sirtoli/ https://nutrita.app/author/raphael-sirtoli/
- m000 6y ago
  For prehistoric nomads hunting would definitely be a more reliable source of food. Think of winters, when there's little to gather but you can still hunt a mammoth or some other large prey. This way, you take advantage of the muscle/fat the animal built while eating stuff you can't eat. So, I could see prehistoric nomads being mostly carnivores for a whole season. Which would also leave enough evidence on their remains. But I agree that the authors seem to have a bias/motive (entrepreneurial and academic) to overstress the importance of eating meat, perhaps cherry-picking on the available evidence.
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    Hunting small game is reasonably reliable. Hunting primarily big game, as the study is suggests, is the textbook example of unreliable high risk, high reward strategies we teach undergrads about. What modern human foragers often do is exploit a huge variety of strategies all at once. They're also highly opportunistic and social mechanisms are used to distribute the successes across a large number of people. For instance, if a bunch of Hadza hunters come across a beehive full of honey, they'll stop hunting and eat it. Such finds end up being a significant source of calories for the Hadza, but the study's argument is that this sort of omnivorousness is a recent innovation.

imagine99 6y ago

Well, regardless of the topic at hand (the point about brain-size shrinking when eating plants certainly sounds interesting), already the infographics are full of obvious typos ("Domesticsted", "Larg prey") which suggests shoddy editing at least. While that made me chuckle a bit in the context of "brain size" it also leads me to not giving to much credence to the quality of the rest of the text (which I cannot really judge on its merits because it's outside my area of expertise). I do tend to refer to the Gell-Mann effect [1] in instances such as this though... However, if there's anyone here who has expertise in this area, I would certainly be very interested to hear what they think. Let me ask more plainly: Should we all ditch salad and go back to eating "bone marrow and brains" tomorrow? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

danr4 6y ago
I'd be very surprised if there was one answer to "what should humans eat?". It probably depends on so many factors unknown to scientists, that the best way is to just try different diets until you feel good.
mkoubaa 6y ago
I didn't see brain size linked directly to diet here, only saw it on the infographic. In another study recently, I saw brain size linked to the challenge of hunting large animals (like cave bears and mammoths)
- elliekelly 6y ago
  That’s interesting because I’ve also read that animal brain size is positively correlated with group communication and social network size. In order for early humans to successfully hunt large animals, especially large predators, I would imagine it would take quite a lot of group communication and coordination.
Daho0n 6y ago
I think the answer is pretty simple: we should eat varied and follow the seasons. That many get pretty sick by going into ketosis shows how unhealthy we are. A healthy human can switch between a diet with lots of carbohydrates and one with few without problems. I'd posit that more than 99% of humans cannot switch between fat burning and glucose burning without getting sick because of withdrawal symptoms.

danr4 6y ago

In 2019, age 30, I ate only red meat (and a little fish) for about 8 months. It was by far the peak of my physical condition. Better sleep, stronger workouts, no mid-day grogginess. Blood test results were as best as one could hope for, apart for the debatable "high cholesterol". Unfortunately a couple of trips abroad (damn Italy) and I got back to a more standard diet. Have put on 15kg since. I've been longing to return to it, but the quality and price of meat here in Israel makes it so hard.

femiagbabiaka 6y ago
IGF-1 is a hell of a drug. It will be interesting to see some anecdotal reports from current carnivore diet followers in a few decades.
- JPKab 6y ago
  Why do we have to wait for anecdotal reports? There are numerous people who have followed this diet for decades in the US, but more importantly, there are entire tribes of humans who have eaten carnivorous diets for thousands of years. How much plant-based foods do you think the average Inuit consumes?
  - femiagbabiaka 6y ago
    1. Bigger groups === more and better data. I didn't know anyone growing up who was interested in ketogenic or carnivorous diets, now it's much more common. 2. Huge difference between the diet of a westerner following carnivore and traditional tribal carnivorous diets 3. The Inuits weren't particularly healthy, I'm not sure why their diet matters: https://www.leoandlongevity.com/post/inuit-health https://www.leoandlongevity.com/post/inuit-health 4. And most importantly, there's a lot of research showing that high levels of IGF-1 associated with diets high in red meat are not good for longevity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjSl4n_KdOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjSl4n_KdOY
JPKab 6y ago
That's a bummer about the meat quality in Israel. I'm guessing it's just super expensive???

JPKab 6y ago

My father had a mid-life crisis in the mid 90's, and went from being an avid hunter and fisherman to being a hardcore animal rights vegan. (It was all precipitated by him meeting and dating a woman who worked at PETA) He was about 45 at the time. Within 2 years, his health had markedly declined. There are healthy vegan diets, but his was an unhealthy vegan diet. Despite no history of heart attacks on either his mother or father's side, he developed heart disease in his early 50s. This was where I first became aware of the scientific fraud that is the lipid hypothesis, and how wrong it is. The Framinham Heart Study has been a source of data that actively refutes the lipid hypothesis for decades, but the nutritional science community has similar issues to many other organizations with tenured experts whose entire reputation is tied to their theories being right. My experience dealing with militant vegans is that there is no amount or type of evidence that would convince them that a diet that includes ANY amount of animal products is healthy. It's a religion to them, and that's that. I was a teen when he converted to veganism, and my encounters with these various activists made me absolutely despise them and their ilk. Truly contemptible people in general, who fully believe the ends justify any means.

raffraffraff 6y ago
I've been vegetarian for 25 years. I'm male, 45 years old, my resting heart rate is around 50, and I can run 10km in under 50 minutes (and I do this about 3 times per week). Scroll back 5 years. My wife and I decided to become vegan (for various reasons - carbon footprint, animal welfare, all that jazz). Having been healthy vegetarians for about 20 years, it should have been easy, but regardless, we were meticulous. In fact, not being the "religious" type, and having found out that bi-valves (oysters, clams, scallops etc) don't have the where-with-all to feel pain, I added them to my diet. We just cut out all eggs and dairy. Now, I can't swear that going vegan caused my health problems, but about a year after going vegan, my overall "vitality" had dropped (I felt tired, but kept up frequent exercise). But the biggest issue was that I couldn't shake off a cold. It would start with the usual sniffle, and within a few days I have a temperature and my lungs would be infected. I went through about a year of constant on-and-off infections. At the worst point, I had two straight months of infection, seemed to shake off for a few weeks, and got it back again for another two months. I was miserable. I was worried it was something really bad like lung cancer. The doctor prescribed me two types of inhaler, lots of antibiotics and told me I had adult onset asthma. The inhalers helped me manage things, but I really just felt like I was keeping another infection at bay all the time. I went back on eggs and a small amount of dairy. A few months later I was back running. I haven't had a single problem since. 5 years without inhalers. I have no idea what really caused my issues. My wife developed an intolerance to soy during our veganism. If she eats tofu for a few days, her skin gets itchy and she eventually get a flare up of rosacea (which btw, she had for months until she figured out the soy connection, but it took weeks after cutting out soy and taking meds before it completely cleared up). The biggest issue I have with a pure vegan diet isn't just cutting out foods, it's the addition of huge amounts of stuff that you normally wouldn't eat in such high amounts (nut milk, nut butter, nut cheese, nut burgers... soy in everything) I have encountered these militant vegans too. I don't get into arguments, I just say "it's not for me".

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

The argument about tools indicating a change in diet: perhaps the baskets and pounders used for vegetable diets didn't survive as long as the flint spearheads. They could seem to 'disappear' in the historical record, simply because they leave no recognizable long-term evidence.

twobitshifter 6y ago

The actual paper was posted yesterday but got flagged. I don’t dispute any of the evidence but I do have 2 points to raise. 1. 95,000 years is plenty of time for adaptations in diet. The development of adult lactase for processing dairy was famously quick. The human diet is today well adapted to other foods without causing severe reactions. 2. The researchers note that our ancestors were primed to store fat for periods of fasting after consuming large prey. The evidence of this is that our fat reserves are larger than today’s carnivores. Yet fasting is more limited in today’s society than perhaps ever before. Obesity may actually be an expression of Paleolithic fitness that was selected for in those times.

mkoubaa 6y ago
I would say 95,000 years is plenty of time to begin to develop adaptations in diet. If as a species our survival was still threatened by starvation for another 100k years we might see more adaptation towards meatless, but that seems unlikely.
- antisthenes 6y ago
  It depends how much of an advantage a certain diet brought from a procreative standpoint. If milk drinkers were the only group who could obtain the necessary amount of calories for bearing offspring and sustained existence, then the adaptation would happy much more quickly. Perhaps even as quick as several generations.
  - mkoubaa 6y ago
    It's not quite as binary as that. Milk tolerance ranges from poison to healthy and everything in between.
Daho0n 6y ago
>Yet fasting is more limited in today’s society than perhaps ever before. Obesity may actually be an expression of Paleolithic fitness that was selected for in those times. That's pretty much what people say about the keto diet.

proc0 6y ago

Not just humans..., I think subsisting and surviving by taking from the environment is what life has done since the beginning. Our success at doing so is now the problem, because of scale, but I think natural selection requires the competition, otherwise I think animals would just be blob-like. Even then we can imagine eventually all blobs multiply and cover the planet, and there would be no choice but to compete at that point, forcing some blobs to evolve into predators, and the others to evolve evasion tactics, etc. That said, it would be great to move away from mass farming, even if it means changing diet.

1experience 6y ago

Good example of media selection bias here, notice how this study is completely ignored by mainstream media: https://imgur.com/a/lkaoClD https://imgur.com/a/lkaoClD if it had said "Humans ate vegetables and little else" it would be on r/all now.

EGreg 6y ago
Don't worry, there were studies that showed the exact opposite LMAO: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ancient-humans-vegetarians-paleolithic-diet_n_1695228 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ancient-humans-vegetarians-pa... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancest... Don't pay too much attention to these "discoveries" being 100% true
m000 6y ago
There is a media bias here, but it's not what you're implying. It is Israeli media picking up a story promoted by Israeli scientists. This is common practice for media in EMEA countries. But most importantly, you're overlooking the authors' bias. 1st/last authors seem to be making an academic career on proving that humans are carnivores. 2nd author is a self-confessed fan of low-carb diets, and listed as the founder of a company offering a nutrition tracker based on the same principles. Not exactly an unbiased trio. And without the hinges of peer-review that would stop them from making wide claims, I would skip the news article altogether. And not being unbiased is probably why you won't see their research on international media, that would arguably be a bit more picky, having a wider selection of science stories to choose from.
- Daho0n 6y ago
  While I don't disagree with your point I don't think you can state that someone being a fan of a low carb diet is not unbiased unless you also say that every single other piece of research on this topic is also biased if it's by someone not "being a fan of low carb diets" (IE. eating like almost everyone does).

EGreg 6y ago

Are you kidding me ... scientists proclaim one extreme, then the other: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ancient-humans-vegetarians-paleolithic-diet_n_1695228 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ancient-humans-vegetarians-pa... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/human-ancest...

imagine99 6y ago
I agree with your irritation (I too would like more authoritative information about this, as it is outside my expertise). However, with regard to the links you posted, I think these are actually the same source and and the HuffPost "article" is just reposted content, not a second opinion on that other viewpoint.

AlotOfReading 6y ago

This topic always becomes an ideological football in public discussions. Nevertheless... The article completely misstates the purpose and findings of the paper, which isn't being helped by the authors here. The position taken in the paper is much less extreme. To summarize, they're staking out a position that middle paleolithic foraging groups were primarily carnivorous, but still had some level of dietary plant consumption. The theoretical contribution is a bit more interesting, and the key line is in the abstract: > We conclude that it is possible to reach a credible reconstruction of the HTL without relying on a simple analogy with recent hunter‐gatherers' diets. The context here being that a perennial problem for the carnivorists has been that almost every foraging group we've documented ethnographically is highly omnivorous (see their rebuttel in 3.1). They're trying to get away from this problem by saying "all of that evidence is irrelevant because lower and middle paleolithic foragers were different". This is an understandable position in general, but specifically tying it to carnivorous dietary reconstructions requires running a gauntlet of theoretical objections, which is why the paper is essentially a long list of retorts to objections. Personally, I don't find the argument convincing. There's a lot of weasel words to escape having to justify positions they really ought to littered throughout. It suggests the argument they're advocating isn't fully developed yet e.g.: > If genetic adaptations to USOs consumption were rather recent, it *suggests* that USOs did not previously comprise a large dietary component. It's not a particularly well-argued paper, but this article is just a terrible summary of what it says.

mpweiher 6y ago
> completely misstates the purpose and findings...primarily carnivorous, but still had some level of dietary plant consumption. That's exactly what the article says, so not sure why you're saying it completely misstates the purpose and findings.
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  Are you saying that your initial reaction to the headline ("For 2 million years, humans ate meat and little else") and first line ("...hyper-carnivorous “apex predators” that ate mostly the meat of large animals") was to note the obvious corollary that "There is little argument that Paleolithic diets were higher in plants than recent Polar diets..."? Since the whole point of science communications is communicating nuanced ideas without perpetuating misunderstandings, the fact that discussions here are reflecting the former rather than the latter is what I mean.

albertgoeswoof 6y ago

Some strange comments in this thread- but this headline doesn’t make sense. Humans (homosapiens) first appeared about 300k years ago, so no we haven’t been eating only meat for 2 million years.

Vadoff 6y ago
Probably implied that it extends to the ancestors of humans.
throwawayboise 6y ago
Presumably they are including predecessor hominids.

uxcolumbo 6y ago

Back then we hunted or scavenged. Those non-human animals we hunted were living freely and we lived in more harmony with the natural world. Now we breed, torture and kill millions and millions of non-human animals and in the process destroy our biosphere [0] We can live perfectly healthy on a plant-based diet - see the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine: https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition We have the brains & technology to create food that is healthy and nutritious without having to continue to support the destructive and cruel factory farm industry. So the question should be how come we accept this immense cruelty and destruction caused by the factory farm industry? Damian Mander - founder of International Anti-Poaching Foundation put it best: https://youtu.be/BUMGBwgGYWw?t=100 https://youtu.be/BUMGBwgGYWw?t=100 ---- [0] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-06-01-new-estimates-environmental-cost-food https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-06-01-new-estimates-environme... https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/ https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...

anotherevan 6y ago

“Vegetarian – that’s an old Indian word meaning ‘lousy hunter’.” — Andy Rooney

__initbrian__ 6y ago

Is it common to refer to all hominids (here: homo habilis and homo erectus) as humans? For some reason I thought the term human was limited to homo sapiens (195k years old) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human