Nutrition – The Evolution Thereof
We are about 30 feet from lips to asshole. That’s a long way for food to travel. It goes through a lot of changes from start to finish. A whole lot.
Where to start? Nutrition? Okay, let’s start there. Humans are mammals as we have a grip of the same features found in all members of this large group. More specifically we are primates, and even more specifically than that Great Apes. You damn dirty ape. Who knew?
Mammals go back around 190ish million years ago, but when it’s been that long what’s a hundred or thousand year’s difference? If you think about the fact that just 171 years ago the phone was invented. I know that pisses off the Alexander Bell fans. He just patented it in 1876. Fuck, where was I? Oh yes, we’re apes. And further, we get to where the rank of hominins.
The distinction of humans being hominin makes us a bit younger than above as we came about a short 5 to 7 million years ago. How is that for a spread. Tell me what you did on this exact day 3 years ago without using technology. Bet you can’t. If you were incarcerated and say that you were in prison that really doesn’t count as a memory.
We have a round skull, higher forehead…anyone ever seen someone with such a damn big forehead they should call it a fivehead? We have short jaws and a bunch of other shit that shows we’re not that far off from saying ug and smacking the ground like it’s a drum.
Just 3 million short years ago our brain was about the size of a chimpanzee’s brain. Two million years ago, Homo habilis (not necessarily considered an ancestor any longer) had a brain that was a whopping 610 mL.
Today Homo sapiens have brains around 1350 mL. Well, some. There is still much debate, but it is thought right now that our closest ancestor is Ardipithecus ramidus from around 4.4 million years ago. Let us not forget that there are a few years still unaccounted for from 4.4 million years ago to about 2.5 million years ago.
Ardipithecus ramidus let’s call him Ardi, ate mostly plants, even leaves. What ever was easily accessible and wasn’t chasing him.
Now we are going to go past the lips to the teeth. Ardi’s teeth made the eating of fruits, usually brittle and soft quite easy. He probably stayed away from nuts that were hard to get into and opted for the easily chewed foods when available. He probably had difficulty with seed coats and veins and stems from leaves for vegetables, but liked buds, flowers, and shoots. It was also found that he would have had great difficulty chewing and eating meat. He just did not have the teeth for it.
This is where everything gets sketchy. We have scientists at each other’s throats over this. The climatologist says it would have been impossible for the species to survive without eating meat because it would have been the only thing readily available. We have evolutionary biologist stating the there is no way the brain would have grown to the capacity for our intelligence if not for the high fat found in meat unless they lived off a pile of nuts and seeds.
I say who cares? Here we are today. We know that we can arrest and reverse diseases with a whole food plant diet. I hate the term WFPB because some people claim to follow that program and still eat meat occasionally because their base is whole plant foods.
References
https://australianmuseum.net.au/learn/science/human-evolution/we-are-humans/