Meat eating made us human. The anthropological evidence strongly supports the idea that the addition of increasingly larger amounts of meat in the diet of our predecessors was essential in the evolution of the large human brain.  Our large brains came at the metabolic expense of our guts, which shrank as our brains grew.

In April 1995 an article appeared in the journal Current Anthropology that was an intellectual tour de force and, in my view, an example of a perfect theoretical paper.  “The  Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis” (ETH) by Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler demonstrated by a brilliant thought experiment that our species didn’t evolve to eat meat but evolved because it ate meat.

The ETH is an example of the kind of scientific detective work that I love.  In fact, this paper is one of my all time favorites.  (An amazing bit of trivia about this paper is that it almost didn’t get published.  I had the opportunity to talk with Leslie Aiello at a meeting a few months ago, and she told me that the journal was reluctant to publish the paper because they thought it too technical for their readers.  I suspect they also found it too controversial.  Now I’m sure they’re glad they published because I would imagine it is the most cited of all the papers ever published in Current Anthropology.)  The authors methodically lay the scientific foundation for their experiment, then, like Sherlock Holmes, progress step by step, accumulating little pieces of data until they reach the ineluctable conclusion that meat eating made us human. I would like to walk us all through their thought processes as laid out in their brilliant paper.

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One of the problems – if it could be called a problem – in writing this blog and moderating the comments is most readers are pretty intelligent. Occasionally I have the angry vegetarian wander in, take me to task for my errant ways, and, after a comeback or two on my part, drift away to never be heard from again.  Thanks to the confirmation bias, this blog pretty much selects against the non-meat eater.  So, I tend to forget how many people there are out there who are pretty much clueless about basic nutrition, and how many people there are who bobble through life spouting cliches they’ve heard along the way as great nutritional truths.  Based on the comments I get on this blog, it seems to me that most people are pretty nutritionally sophisticated and reasonable.

But I have just recently been disabused of that notion.

My friend Tim Ferriss put up an excerpt of our new book The 6-Week Cure on his site a few days ago and asked me if I would mind answering a few of the commenters.  I told him I wouldn’t mind at all, but I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into.

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Felis silvestris lybica Photo by Noorderlicht

When you get right down to it, house cats are pretty useless. If you’re overrun with mice, cats can be a help, but that’s pretty much it.  They are fiercely  independent and, unlike dogs, which have a want-to-please-their-master nature, cats don’t really give a flip.  They don’t fetch, they don’t roll over, they don’t sit up and beg, and, for the most part, they don’t come when called. If you had a kid who acted like a cat, you would probably put him/her up for adoption. So why are they the most popular house pet in the world today?

Scientists using DNA analysis have determined that virtually all house cats alive today are descended from a specific line of wild cats, Felis silvestris lybica, that are indigenous to the Middle East.  Although there are a number of lines of wildcats throughout the world, mitochondrial DNA analysis of all breeds of house cats appears to indicate they all descended from this one branch of the wildcat family. Read more »

When I wrote the Overcoming the Curse of the Mummies chapter in Protein Power, I wrote mainly about the evidence of disease found in the mummies of ancient Egyptians and correlated this disease with their high-carbohydrate diet.  Along with all the material on mummies, which is the part everyone seems to remember, I wrote about a study done in the United States in the 1970s that persuasively demonstrated the superiority of the hunter diet as compared to an agricultural diet, which no one seems to remember.  I came across that study a couple of days ago and decided to present it in a little more detail than I was able to in Protein Power.

The anthropological record of early man clearly shows health took a nosedive when populations made the switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture. It takes a physical anthropologist about two seconds to look at a skeleton unearthed from an archeological site to tell if the owner of that skeleton was a hunter-gatherer or an agriculturist.

Unlike the Egyptian mummy data, there is usually no soft tissue material left when remains of early man are found.  But the skeletal remains of hunter-gatherers show them to be much healthier than agriculturalists.  Hunter-gatherers had better bones, had no signs of iron-deficiency anemia, no signs of infection, few (if any) dental cavities, fewer signs of arthritis and were in general larger and more robust than their agriculture-following contemporaries.  One of the theories as to why postulates that hunter-gatherers lived in smaller, more mobile societies.  Consequently, they weren’t as likely to get communicable diseases and were able to travel to find food, whereas agriculturists were rooted to one spot, lived in larger groups, making the spread of disease more likely, and they were subject to lack of food if a drought or other natural disaster decimated their crops.

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