Comment by goatsneez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goatsneez | Hacker News Reader

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That is very uninformed feel-good-projecting-ones-bias-into-reinterpreting-solid-evidence-of-history. First, any anthropology book will dispel such notion, and or watch youtube videos featuring few days living as a hunter-gatherer, such as this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAGjuRwx_Y8 or more here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny4bHOnSg0o

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.

My view has nothing to do with political correctness, but simply with the difference in difficulty between collecting plants and hunting/trapping animals with primitive tools, and the subsequent deduction that it's more likely for our ancestors to have relied more on the source of calories that was more readily available.

And the article itself explains how the current point of view on our ancestors life style may have originated.

Point taken, and my judgement is not personally at you with the political correctness comment. It was a lament on the general recent (couple of years) development when we can see sprouting of and gaining undeserved media attention due to the socio-political climate in the west. This article is just point-in-case. There is overwhelming evidence (direct and indirect) even in the way our teeth and jaws evolved, collectibles and artefacts point to the fact that meat diet played overwhelming role in defining us as humans (in the wide context of things).

You are assuming edible plants to have been readily available at high enough concentrations at the hunter gatherer stage of human evolution.

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.

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