Posted on 12/19/2022 11:24:30 AM PST by bitt
Metabolism studies reveal surprising insights into how we burn calories—and how cooperative food production helped Homo sapiens flourish
It was my daughter Clara’s seventh birthday party, a scene at once familiar and bizarre. The celebration was an American take on a classic script: a shared meal of pizza and picnic food, a few close COVID-compliant friends and family, a beaming kid blowing out candles on a heavily iced cake. With roughly 380,000 boys and girls around the world turning seven each day, it was a ritual no doubt repeated by many, the world’s most prolific primate singing “Happy Birthday” in an unbroken global chorus.
Such a wholesome setting seems an unlikely place for rampant rule breaking. But as an evolutionary anthropologist, I can’t help but notice the blatant disregard our species shows for the natural order. Nearly every aspect of our modern lives marks a cheerfully outrageous departure from the laws that govern every other species on the planet, and this birthday party was no exception. Aside from the fresh veggies left wilting in the sun, none of the food was recognizable as a product of nature. The cake was a heat-treated amalgam of pulverized grass seed, chicken eggs, cow milk and extracted beet sugar. The raw materials for the snacks and drinks would take a forensic chemist years to reconstruct. It was a calorie bonanza that animals foraging in the wild could only dream about, and we were giving it away to people who didn’t even share our genes. All this to celebrate some obscure astronomical alignment, the moment our planet swept through the same position relative to its star as on the day my daughter was born. At seven years old, most mammals are grandparents if they’re lucky enough to be alive. Clara was still a kid, dependent on us for food and shelter and years away from independence.
Humans weren’t always such scofflaws. We come from a good Family. The living apes, our closest relatives, are well-behaved primates, eating fruit and leaves straight from the tree and nibbling on the occasional meal of insects or small game. Like every other mammal, apes learn early to fend for themselves, foraging on their own as soon as they’re weaned, and they know better than to give their hard-earned food away. Fossils from deep in the human lineage, the first four million years after we broke from the other apes, indicate our early ancestors played by the same ecological rules.
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And then we discovered eating meat....
Which is the REASON we have developed CANINE TEETH
I've double labeled my water and couldn't figure out anything dealing with calories.
The author is overly verbose, but I did find a bit of humor in his description of the cake.
The celebration was an American take on a classic script: a shared meal of pizza and picnic food, a few close COVID-compliant friends and family...
Still alive and screaming meat.
But they show no inclination to make complex tools, build, control fire or do much of anything besides eat, sleep, hit things, copulate with any female around and throw their poop.
Something like democrats come to think of it.
Meat eating is not the magic switch some think it is.
Sci-Am the main stream media of the scientific set.
Mostly lies with strong support of the current leftist narrative covered by a superficial gloss of science.
I dropped my subscription when Martin Gardner retired.
I don’t know why these liberals are allowed to write scientific articles. Birthday parties for seven year old kids are anecdotal at best and don’t do anything except prompt emotional responses. Science used to be derived from logic and reasoning by way of experimentation. Now it’s all about feelings.
Does the article actually talk about the headline or is it all empty blather by the author?
So, did the move to a sharing community get started by some ancient soy-boy he wasn’t man enough to hunt nor willing enough to lower himself to foraging with the women? Did he figure out the only way he was going to survive was to convince others to collect his food for him while he sat back and painted cave walls?
I have no aspiration to live like an ape.
I am not descended from apes.
And mankind is ingenious the way we have gotten to the point where our food is so safe and plentiful and appealing. More birthday parties please.
We are far healthier and happier than apes for crying out loud. Why do we idolize primates.
“ Chimps eat meat.”
Yes they do. It wasn’t thought they did until it was observed. Capturing and killing baboons, for example, and eating them.
“But they show no inclination to make complex tools, build, control fire or do much of anything besides eat, sleep, hit things, copulate with any female around and throw their poop.”
They have been observed making a very basic tool from a twig to use in eating ants.
I don’t know if that is behavior all chimps show or only certain more clever ones.
Actually, I disagree. Many scientific discoveries were driven by idle observations of the world around us that drove someone to research cause and effect. See Newton and a falling apple.
Meat eating is not the magic switch some think it is.
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There is very nearly nothing produced in the dietary “sciences” that wasn’t ideological or political agenda driven from the very start.
“few close COVID-compliant friends and family…”
They just can’t help themselves.
L
While picking up a stick makes the stick a "tool" it is not a complex tool.
Any number of birds pick up hard shell prey and drop them on to rocks to break them open.
They are using the rocks as tool but once again they are still not complex tool makers.
I have always found the study of how cooking and other ways of preparing food changes it to make the food easier to digest interesting.
But then I am a cook so it is in my wheel house so to speak.
Wow, Caucasians are meat eaters. We have evolved to eat plants occasionally. We are white. We have the ability to create clothing. We can survive the winter. All things Sub- Saharan Africans did not do to any great extent. Caucasians, especially the blond hair blue eyed kind had no plants to eat for 9 out of 12 months. They did no the seasons because it meant life or death. Just as other plants and animals have adapted to the seasons.
Whats less than a two century’s old are breakfast, sugar, corn starch, white flour. Sure there was some minor usage of these things but mostly for the very rich. And even then it was rare.
We spent 60,000 years learning to live in Europe. In the past 10,000 years we learned to farm animals, then plants. And we learned to adapt to very cold temperatures. We are the hunters and gatherers. And gathering was not available most of the year. We could fish and hunt. We could live in short cold days. And long colder nights. That is who we are.
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