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Originally Posted by agnostic  Whew! What a Thread!!
Could you point me to that mountain? I'd really like to read some of the stuff you would reference for statements like this, because it clearly goes against what I have read. What you find is usually based on what you are looking for. So I'd like to know more about where your point of view comes from.
I really doubt that any primate would only eat " an occasional small animal in the case of survival".
There are severe limits to comparing us to monkeys. We are, after all, another animal. We evolved into the big-brained primates we are probably because of the introduction of high-caloric animal foods. Which pressure actually caused the evolution may be open as there are many options. But the fuel for it is pretty clear among anthropologists: meat.
It allowed us to have a smaller gut and thus develop more similarly energetically expensive brain tissue. It's called the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis. You can read a very good explaination and get a link to the original paper here. |
There is actually new data out that it might have been more about the tubers than the meat. Tubers were everywhere and a relatively under-used resource.
Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number variation
Again, the argument is pretty pointless. There is plenty of evidence now that eating excess meat is harmful to health, no matter what we evolved eating.