Benzito171
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I need sources for a research paperI'm doing a research paper for class proving that humans are carnivores. Could you guys send me links to any anthropology info or archeology digs that suggest humans evolved as carnivores? Everything I look up tries to attribute evidence to plant consumption. "Stone tools used to extract grains." "evidence of grinding on molars suggests plant consumption" Thanks a lot.
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Glennart
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http://www.thepaleodiet.com/published_research/
This one pretty much sums it up. Note that Cordain claims that early humans did not eat fish, only meat. That might explain why so many people today are allergic to fish while meat is tolerated by virtually everyone.
13. Cordain L, Watkins BA, Mann NJ. Fatty acid composition and energy density of foods available to African hominids: evolutionary implications for human brain development. World Rev Nutr Diet 2001, 90:144-161.
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Scavenged ruminant brain tissue would have provided a moderate energy source and a rich source of DHA and AA. Fish would have provided a rich source of DHA and AA, but not energy, and the fossil evidence provides scant evidence for their consumption. Plant foods generally are of a low energetic density and contain virtually no DHA or AA. Because early hominids were likely not successful in hunting large ruminants, then scavenged skulls (containing brain) likely provided the greatest DHA and AA sources, and long bones (containing marrow) likely provided the concentrated energy source necessary for the evolution of a large, metabolically active brain in ancestral humans. |
In modern hunter gatherer diets animal foods provide the largest amount of calories.
11. Cordain L, Brand Miller J, Eaton SB, Mann N, Holt SHA, Speth JD. Plant to animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in world wide hunter-gatherer diets. Am J Clin Nutr 2000, 71:682-92.
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Our analysis showed that whenever and wherever it was ecologically possible, hunter-gatherers consumed high amounts (45-65% of energy) of animal food. Most (73%) of the worldwide hunter-gatherer societies derived >50% (> or =56-65% of energy) of their subsistence from animal foods, whereas only 14% of these societies derived >50% (> or =56-65% of energy) of their subsistence from gathered plant foods. This high reliance on animal-based foods coupled with the relatively low carbohydrate content of wild plant foods produces universally characteristic macronutrient consumption ratios in which protein is elevated (19-35% of energy) at the expense of carbohydrates (22-40% of energy). |
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Glennart
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This also came to mind. (I think it was posted somewhere on this forum before)
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The 7,700-year-old woman who ate like a wolf
The thighbone of a woman who died about 7,700 years ago, found in a dried-up channel of the River Trent in Nottinghamshire, has undermined some of the cherished clichés of the Mesolithic era. The poor lady, it seems, never saw the sea, and never ate a shellfish or perhaps even a hazelnut in her life.
It is sometimes argued that Mesolithic people in Britain generally stuck to the coastlines, while the ubiquitous hazelnuts and shellfish shells found at campsites have produced a standard view of Mesolithic diet. The Lady of the Trent, by contrast, ate almost nothing but meat - and none of it came from the sea.
Stable isotope analysis - a laboratory technique for measuring the source of protein in bone - conducted by Mike Richards of Bradford University found that the woman's diet was virtually as meat-rich as that of a carnivorous wild animal. Nitrogen levels were measured as 9.3, on a scale running from herbivore cattle at 6 to carnivore wolves at about 10. Carbon levels showed that her diet had been purely terrestrial, involving no marine food.
The bone, radiocarbon dated to between about 5735-5630 BC, was excavated from a gravel quarry at Staythorpe near Newark by Glyn Davies of the Sheffield University-based unit, ARCUS. Mesolithic human bones are exceptionally rare in Britain, and its discovery in a former channel of the Trent may lend support to the theory that bodies were disposed of in 'sacred' rivers - either floated on rafts or thrown directly into the water. A collection of Neolithic skulls was found in the Trent a few years ago.
Close to the thigh bone, archaeologists found a group of butchered Mesolithic animal bones, including aurochs, roe deer and otter. Elsewhere, in a river channel dating to the Bronze Age, a cut-marked deer antler was found which had been used as raw material for tools. |
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba66/news.shtml#item4
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