Did eating meat make us human?
wired.com
wired.com
Meat was not a reliable food-source for our ancestors. Hunting was dangerous and not always successful. Plants don't run, they don't fight back. Our ancestors were likely not so much "hunter-gatherers" as they were "gatherers who occasionally were lucky enough to hunt something succesfully".
Plants were always the primary food source of most omnivores. Humans are no exception to that rule.
Then why do cave paintings depict hunting scenes so often? For the same reason why action-movies are full of expensive sports cars instead of old rust buckets or hand-me-downs.
And better brains don't just make hunting easier, they can also reason better about what plants can be found where and when more efficiently, culminating in the stroke of genius that was stopping to collect plants in the wild and instead mass-growing them in the controlled circumstances of agriculture.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-of-natu...
If one is to learn from evidence rather than to confirm once cherished biases it would take no time to read even so distant history narratives to wake up from this anti-meat re-interpretation of our ancestor's life-styles. To what degree and how meat should be collected today is a separate issue ... but do not let political correctness of today let us bias the solid evidence of our how our ancestors lived. Meat has been and still is in many areas of planet the highest value (wealth, prosperity, health -wise).
And whether the question in the title is worth answering as posed is yet another issue. I think Tim Minchin's song "the fence" would fit well as an audio epilogue to this post.
And the article itself explains how the current point of view on our ancestors life style may have originated.
It is energetically more expensive to roam a large area to gather x calories than finding and killing an animal (herbivore) that did that for you - never mind the ability of the herbivore to release calories contained in leaves and grass (something humans cannot do)
Then in winter this ratio increases even more.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the African savannah, but early human evolution here was definitely not driven by the abundance of edible vegetation.