from Hacker News

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

by shadykiller on 4/5/21, 8:00 PM with 138 comments

  • by AlotOfReading on 4/5/21, 8:54 PM

    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.

  • by imagine99 on 4/5/21, 8:36 PM

    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

  • by twobitshifter on 4/5/21, 8:46 PM

    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.

  • by danr4 on 4/5/21, 8:37 PM

    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.

  • by proc0 on 4/5/21, 8:49 PM

    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.

  • by femiagbabiaka on 4/5/21, 8:32 PM

  • by maw on 4/5/21, 8:29 PM

    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.

  • by JoeAltmaier on 4/5/21, 8:41 PM

    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.

  • by JPKab on 4/5/21, 8:39 PM

    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.

  • by EGreg on 4/5/21, 8:53 PM

  • by albertgoeswoof on 4/5/21, 8:55 PM

    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.

  • by uxcolumbo on 4/5/21, 9:03 PM

    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

    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

    ----

    [0] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-06-01-new-estimates-environme...

    https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...

  • by __initbrian__ on 4/5/21, 9:47 PM

    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

  • by anotherevan on 4/5/21, 9:44 PM

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

    — Andy Rooney

  • by DiabloD3 on 4/5/21, 8:19 PM

    Website down?

  • by 1experience on 4/5/21, 8:53 PM

    Good example of media selection bias here, notice how this study is completely ignored by mainstream media: https://imgur.com/a/lkaoClD

    if it had said "Humans ate vegetables and little else" it would be on r/all now.