A taste for fat may have made us human, says study

As the forests retreated, smallish apes were forced onto the grasslands and had to compete in a different habitat. No claws to work with, no real fangs to speak of. Just a grasping thumb, an upper body shaped by brachiation, and a habit of flinging feces at other apes challenging them for territory.

Rocks can drive predators off carcasses and kill smaller animals. Getting better at throwing rocks brings in more food. An upright posture helps, a bigger brain for visuospacial processing helps.

Eventually we were bigger apes and picked up persistence hunting, spear making, ax making, and fire. Persistence hunting was a group cooperative effort driving us toward protospeech.

True speech is admittedly a bit of a head-scratcher. Lucky mutation maybe? Fairly confident about the rocks, though. Once you’re throwing rocks, smashing bones open for the marrow is a pretty obvious move.

The most efficient diet for humans is one high in fat, moderate in protein, and low in carbs; which explains the absolutely curable disorder known as Diabetes II (aka chronic insulin resistance).

And before anyone jumps on the "keto is a fad diet" bandwagon: if it is, indeed, a fad, it is a fad that modern humans have eaten for 200,000 years, and our ancestors have eaten for another 2 million before that. If our taste for fat did not make us human, it certainly defines a particular trait of ours that all humans depend on.

Also take a moment to appreciate exactly what nuclear power implies in terms of bang-for-buck mining and transport costs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

These are usually not eaten by most animals, and are available almost everywhere close to year-long, plus they can be stored for later in a dry place.

The human brain consumes a huge amount of calories, so cooking which was done millions of years before homo sapiens arrived as definitively a lot to do with becoming a modern human.

A more intriguing question is, how did cooking start, and how did apes became intelligent enough in order to know how to cook?

What? It's simply not true that lean protein takes more energy to digest than it produces -- it takes 20-30% of the energy to digest it, not >100% [1]. It's not celery -- and even the idea that celery is a "negative-calorie food" turns out to be a myth [2], so it's basically ridiculous to suggest that meat could be.

And while wild animals can have somewhat leaner meat, there's plenty of fat, see the table in [3], and seeing as animals really were abundant back then, it would be easy to eat as much fat as you wanted (remember, it comes in big chunks) and throw away any excess super-lean muscles.

And to be clear, despite the name, "rabbit starvation" is about vitamin deficiency, not calorie deficiency. [4]

Since these quotes are coming from the paper's author, I'm finding the whole thing highly suspect... intriguing, but hard to take seriously with such factual inaccuracies.

[1] https://www.precisionnutrition.com/digesting-whole-vs-proces...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-calorie_food

[3] https://news.psu.edu/story/186616/1997/12/10/fat-and-cholest...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning

Starch granule are found in the teeth of many hominid fossils. We produce amylase in our saliva which breaks down cooked starches when it hits our tongues. Other omnivores do not have this adaptation.

You cannot have a high fat diet hunting (deer and small game simply do not have high amounts of fat). We moved on to agriculture because it provided plenty of calories and didn't run away from us when we tried to kill it.

While we may have eaten fat opportunistically - it's starches and fire that got us to where we are.

Natural selection tells us the process typically works in the reverse order: environmental pressures create a situation where the emergence of increased intelligence grants the individual an ability to leverage the calorie source to their distinct reproductive advantage; not just relative to lions but relative to those in their group. So the marginally improved intelligence mutation occurs first, and it has to be so advantageous that it can overcome counterveiling selective pressures such as more aggressive individuals simply taking the calorie rich source. Were it otherwise we'd be living in Planet of the Apes, or more likely would never have existed.

Whatever evolutionary strategy our ancestors found themselves pursuing, it almost certainly must have been unique and special. The notion that we developed intelligence because intelligence intrinsically provides a reproductive advantage doesn't make any more sense than the notion that we developed intelligence because we could eat fat. Such simple strategies are immediately, incrementally, and perpetually available to countless species, now, then, and prior. If it were true it would imply that evolution is a simple escalator for traits like intelligence, but we see no such evidence of that.

I have not been able to track down this paper again, but the idea that adopting an aquatic diet was a step in the evolution of homo sapiens seems to be 'in the air'; this paper seemed to be saying that a subsequent switch away from that diet was also important. IIRC, it included both a nutritional argument, and the point that it allowed this hominin to spread beyond lake-shores and coastlines.

Is this correct? I've never heard this position before.

Question is why.

My brief research after reading this article showed that cats can't produce their own fat or proteins. And are poor in taking energy from carbohydrates.

Since they can't get their energy from carbs, they eat fat along with proteins.

Say our ancestors couldn't farm. Or were carnivores then it makes sense that they'd seek fat source by instinct just to stay alive.

The argument that fat eating made us human is fiction.