More research confirms what many have been arguing for years – that without meat and cooking, the human brain would not have evolved. Christopher Wanjek takes up the story:

Sorry, vegans: Eating meat and cooking food is how humans got their big brains

Eating meat and cooking food made us human, the studies suggest, enabling the brains of our prehuman ancestors to grow dramatically over a few million years.

Although this isn’t the first such assertion from archaeologists and evolutionary biologists, the new studies demonstrate that it would have been biologically implausible for humans to evolve such a large brain on a raw, vegan diet and that meat-eating was a crucial element of human evolution at least a million years before the dawn of humankind.

Calories to grow our brains

At the core of this research is the understanding that the modern human brain consumes 20 percent of the body’s energy at rest, twice that of other primates. Meat and cooked foods were needed to provide the necessary calorie boost to feed a growing brain.

One study, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the brain size of several primates. For the most part, larger bodies have larger brains across species. Yet humans have exceptionally large, neuron-rich brains for our body size, while gorillas — three times as massive as humans — have smaller brains with one-third the neurons. Why?

The answer, it seems, is the gorillas’ raw, vegan diet (devoid of animal protein), which requires hours upon hours of eating to provide enough calories to support their mass.

….Similarly, early humans eating only raw vegetation would have needed to munch for more than nine hours a day to consume enough calories, the researchers calculated. Thus, a raw, vegan diet would have been unlikely, given the danger and other difficulties of gathering so much food.

Cooking makes more foods edible year-round and releases more nutrients and calories from both vegetables and meat, Herculano-Houzel said.

“The bottom line is, it is certainly possible to survive on an exclusively raw diet in our modern day, but it was most likely impossible to survive on an exclusively raw diet when our species appeared,” Herculano-Houzel told LiveScience.

Full Report

Bubblecar said:

More research confirms what many have been arguing for years – that without meat and cooking, the human brain would not have evolved. Christopher Wanjek takes up the story:

Sorry, vegans: Eating meat and cooking food is how humans got their big brains

Eating meat and cooking food made us human, the studies suggest, enabling the brains of our prehuman ancestors to grow dramatically over a few million years.

Although this isn’t the first such assertion from archaeologists and evolutionary biologists, the new studies demonstrate that it would have been biologically implausible for humans to evolve such a large brain on a raw, vegan diet and that meat-eating was a crucial element of human evolution at least a million years before the dawn of humankind.

Calories to grow our brains

At the core of this research is the understanding that the modern human brain consumes 20 percent of the body’s energy at rest, twice that of other primates. Meat and cooked foods were needed to provide the necessary calorie boost to feed a growing brain.

One study, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the brain size of several primates. For the most part, larger bodies have larger brains across species. Yet humans have exceptionally large, neuron-rich brains for our body size, while gorillas — three times as massive as humans — have smaller brains with one-third the neurons. Why?

The answer, it seems, is the gorillas’ raw, vegan diet (devoid of animal protein), which requires hours upon hours of eating to provide enough calories to support their mass.

….Similarly, early humans eating only raw vegetation would have needed to munch for more than nine hours a day to consume enough calories, the researchers calculated. Thus, a raw, vegan diet would have been unlikely, given the danger and other difficulties of gathering so much food.

Cooking makes more foods edible year-round and releases more nutrients and calories from both vegetables and meat, Herculano-Houzel said.

“The bottom line is, it is certainly possible to survive on an exclusively raw diet in our modern day, but it was most likely impossible to survive on an exclusively raw diet when our species appeared,” Herculano-Houzel told LiveScience.

Full Report

Big brains found fire.

>Big brains found fire.

Early hominids would presumably have been eating raw meat for some time before they learned to control fire.

It makes sense, vegetarian animals like sheep and cows and hippies are stupid, meat eaters like tigers and foxes are sharp and clever and cunning

Bubblecar said:

>Big brains found fire.

Early hominids would presumably have been eating raw meat for some time before they learned to control fire.

Perhaps.. Is there evidence?

Peak Warming Man said:

It makes sense, vegetarian animals like sheep and cows and hippies are stupid, meat eaters like tigers and foxes are sharp and clever and cunning

so you think?

Peak Warming Man said:

It makes sense, vegetarian animals like sheep and cows and hippies are stupid, meat eaters like tigers and foxes are sharp and clever and cunning

elephants are vegetarian

neomyrtus_ said:

Peak Warming Man said:

It makes sense, vegetarian animals like sheep and cows and hippies are stupid, meat eaters like tigers and foxes are sharp and clever and cunning

elephants are vegetarian

I’m fairly sure they don’t wash all their greens.

flytraps and sundews eat meat – they’re not smartz

The thing is.. Elephants don’t cook and Rhinos stamp fires out.

From the article:

The second study, published in October the journal PLoS ONE, examined the remains of a prehuman toddler who died from malnutrition about 1.5 million years ago. Shards of a skull found in modern-day Tanzania reveal that the child had porotic hyperostosis, a type of spongy bone growth associated with low levels of dietary iron and vitamins B9 and B12, the result of a diet lacking animal products in a species that requires them.

The child was around the weaning age. So either the child’s mother’s breast milk lacked key nutrients or the child himself did not consume enough nutrients directly from meat or eggs.

Either way, the finding implies that meat must have been an integral, and not sporadic, element of the prehuman diet more than 1 million years ago, said the study’s lead author, Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo, an archaeologist at Complutense University in Madrid.

This supports the theory that meat fueled human brain evolution because meat — from arachnids to zebras — was plentiful on the African savanna, where humans evolved, and is the best package of calories, proteins, fats and Vitamin B12 needed for brain growth and maintenance.

“Carnivore animals, whether terrestrial or aquatic, are bigger-brained than herbivores,” Dominguez-Rodrigo told LiveScience. He added that “there is no society that live as vegans,” essentially because it wouldn’t be possible to get Vitamin B12, which is only available in animal products.

neomyrtus_ said:

flytraps and sundews eat meat – they’re not smartz

smart enough to catch flies.. see how many meat eaters can.

Bubblecar said:

From the article:

The second study, published in October the journal PLoS ONE, examined the remains of a prehuman toddler who died from malnutrition about 1.5 million years ago. Shards of a skull found in modern-day Tanzania reveal that the child had porotic hyperostosis, a type of spongy bone growth associated with low levels of dietary iron and vitamins B9 and B12, the result of a diet lacking animal products in a species that requires them.

The child was around the weaning age. So either the child’s mother’s breast milk lacked key nutrients or the child himself did not consume enough nutrients directly from meat or eggs.

Either way, the finding implies that meat must have been an integral, and not sporadic, element of the prehuman diet more than 1 million years ago, said the study’s lead author, Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo, an archaeologist at Complutense University in Madrid.

This supports the theory that meat fueled human brain evolution because meat — from arachnids to zebras — was plentiful on the African savanna, where humans evolved, and is the best package of calories, proteins, fats and Vitamin B12 needed for brain growth and maintenance.

“Carnivore animals, whether terrestrial or aquatic, are bigger-brained than herbivores,” Dominguez-Rodrigo told LiveScience. He added that “there is no society that live as vegans,” essentially because it wouldn’t be possible to get Vitamin B12, which is only available in animal products.

I cannot envisage how I get my B12.. but nobody.. docktards or otherwise have ever suggested that I’m short of it.

Bubblecar said:

This supports the theory that meat fueled human brain evolution because meat — from arachnids to zebras — was plentiful on the African savanna, where humans evolved, and is the best package of calories, proteins, fats and Vitamin B12 needed for brain growth and maintenance.

Hold up- what kinds of arachnids were these weirdos eating? Deep fried spider is bad enough, I don’t want to think about raw.

>from arachnids to zebras

I think that’s just an “A-Z” rhetorical device :)

They may well have been eating spiders and insects (chimps eat ants etc), but we don’t have direct evidence of them scoffing any particular species thereof.