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Comment by airhead969 | Hacker News Reader

You don't chase down most little critters, you bait and trap. That does require being less of a dummy.

> You don't chase down most little critters, you bait and trap

The switch, from large to small, seems critical. Hunting big game requires cooperation and communication. That tooling gets supercharged when it has to domain switch. (Counterfactual: forcing lions to sustain themselves on rabbits will probably produce prides of dead lions.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning

I just watched "Kingdom of the White Wolf" on Disney+ which has exactly that situation. The white wolves of Ellesmere island hunt musk oxen; there isn't much else there except snow hares. At one point after not managing to take down a musk ox for a while they do hunt the snow hares and manage to get one... which serves to cement their pack bonds, but the calories gained were probably less than what the spent on that hunt.

Great mini-series, recommended.

Interesting. Wonder if this conflicts with the idea that human brains grew as a result of eating more meat. That instead human brains grew due to evolutionary need of harder to catch meat sources.

Not directly related, but I find myself to be mentally sharper when hungry, if on edge a little.

As protohumans and humans invaded lands, they likely extincted megafauna and flora calorie and protein sources that were easiest to access. This then likely required more mental effort and creativity to solve food security problems with hunting and gardening.

It's interesting as it's a common argument that "meat caused us to have big brains, meat good", but that analysis might not be so clear cut. If this paper is right it may be more of the search for meat is what caused our brains to grow and less so meat protein.

It seems nonsensical to me that simply eating meat protein could somehow cause a genetic change leading to great-grandchildren with larger brains.

It doesn't cause the genetic change, the genetic change is random. But if you were, simply by chance, born with a bigger brain that required more calories to support, you would be at a disadvantage to everyone else, and your mutation would quickly die out unless you were in a situation where you had excess calories available, such as by eating meat.

It doesn't seem that nonsensical to me when considering things like epigenetics. It also doesn't seem all that nonsensical if you flip the causality to "some genetic change resulted in more brain activity/growth and necessitated more protein consumption as a result".

Right, phrasing it as "meat causes brains" confuses the direction of causality and fails to explain all the meat-eating animals that didn't grow large brains.

> As protohumans and humans invaded lands, they likely extincted megafauna...

It is not as certain as most non-experts believe and a controversial subject among experts why megafauna seems to have died out globally rather quickly. So to use "likely" is too strong. "Possibly," is a far better descriptor here: did a global human population of only 1M-15M at the end of the last ice age really kill all of the megafauna everywhere, at once? Humans possibly contributed, but with only sticks and stones technology, how could so few kill every last one of what must have been enormous populations of megafauna? And why?

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