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Comment by thedaly | Hacker News Reader

I don't think our ancestors had the luxury of being vegan.

I don't think our ancestors had the luxury of being vegan.

on the evolutionary scale, this is provably false. all the great apes are vegetarian. we have flat, grinding teeth like cows, and long intestinal tracts like cows too -- not the quick, short intestinal tracts of predators or their sharp, pointy teeth.

strictly speaking, not even cows are vegan. not absolutely, perfectly, and totally. one of the weird side effects of ubiquitous cameras today is people have caught cows eating birds that were trapped in fences. it doesn't happen a lot, but it happens.

but overall, with a reasonable margin of approximation, then yes, our ancestors were definitely vegan, at least our evolutionary ones.

Chimpazees do hunting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee#Hunting

" their sharp, pointy teeth." Humen can create weapons and fire. No need for long teeth.

Australopithecus did eat animals. "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus#Diet"

Its a common misconception among vegetarians that humen were originally vegetarians. Quiet the opposite is true.

we have evidence for hunter gathering societies since 1.8 million years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Archaeological...

1.8M years is a drop in the bucket on an evolutionary timeline

Humen can create weapons and fire. No need for long teeth.

sure. is that evolution or technology?

1.) Can you just admit that your original claims are debunked by wikipedia? 2.) Of course 1.8 Million years matter in Evolution. Please make you familiar with the Wikipedia article instead being a pseudo sceptical.

sure, ok. I misspoke when I said all the great apes are vegetarian. in reality, all the great apes are and were mostly vegetarian.

idk if that's really worth the effort, but I admit it, you made a point.

edit: to everybody else, I apologize for the passive-aggressive vibe, I just don't see where else this (requested!) reply can really go.

Our ancestors didn’t abuse animals on the scale we do now.

Ancient people did not see animals are beings with feeling, they were seen as useful production machines.

It's only in modern times that we have the luxury of taking the animal's feeling into account at all. I'm sure you would want even more consideration for the animals, but it's much better today than it was.

How do you know that "ancient people" never thought of animals as having feelings? Seems an extraordinarily broad claim given all the cultures and ages that encompass "ancient people"

I mean even my own currently-alive ancestors (farmers, the majority of them) don't look at livestock as living, conscious beings. They obviously care for each animal and give them a swift and as-painless-as-possible butchering when the time comes, but they're not the bleeding hearts that many people these days are, they're mostly just vehicles for vital necessities.

I don't find it difficult to imagine my great-great-great-great-(fill in the appropriate number of greats here to qualify for ancient ancestors) grandmother butchering a pig and not really giving it a second thought at all, having grown up on a farm myself. Hell, my current grandma is probably much gentler and gives the pork a much better time than my ancient ancestors did

I think it's a mistake to look at cultural trends across the last century and to extrapolate from there without any broader research.

Because I read some of their writings? The concept of a "Pet" was foreign to them. Animals - even dogs, were there to work.

The concept of how an animal was feeling simply didn't occur to them. An animal was a tool, and you took good care of the tool, but not because of the tool, but because then it was more useful.

It was the 18th century when animal rights started becoming a thing, which exactly corresponds with the industrial age when things became less scarce and people could worry about animals, and not just themselves.

"Some of", indeed. The poster above is correct that your statements are over-broad.

There are hundreds of Roman monuments, inscriptions, and poems [celebrating dogs](https://thepetrifiedmuse.blog/2015/06/20/every-dog-has-his-d...) as companions and pets. There are medieval European graves that strongly suggest sentimentality towards the animals buried in them. There's this [lovely ninth-century Irish poem](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/48267/...) about a cat. Someone with more knowledge in the area than I possess should comment on animal portraiture in ancient and early-modern China and Japan, but that was a thing as well.

I think the fairest thing to say is that people in every era - very much including today - instrumentalize some animals, and sentimentalize others.

You read some writing by some "ancient" people (post writing 'ancient it seems) and you're launching into broad sweeping generalisations about all "ancient people" ?

Wow.

Meanwhile, I've travelled a lot for work - mostly to odd corners of the world, and I've yet to meet people that didn't have stories about animals and animal behaviours.

Famously, for example, Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime stories are largely about animals, Tiddalick the Frog, Emu and the Jabiru, etc.

They encapsulate the place of animals in the environment, and as hunter gatherers attuned to where next years meal will come from, attention is paid to breeding and caring for the young so that there are full grown adults to breed again and to eat.

Rightly or wrongly the stories are about the imagined feelings of animals, the things that make them happy and plentiful, the bad things that cause numbers to dwindle.

Various people had various relationships with various animals, not as "pets" but as other beings in the world.

For example: Ngarritj - the Yolngu speaking bird

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbSxc6Y1aVA

Buddhism even back then 2500 years ago was very conscious of all that.

some != "all people across all cultures for all time"

"A wise person does not kill any living being."

- Mahavira, 6th century BC

(Translated, of course.)

We can easily conclude that Mahavira was either a dumb person, or an hypocritical one, 21th century AD.

> Our ancestors didn’t abuse animals on the scale we do now.

It's sad this type of trolling is becoming tolerated on HN.

How is this trolling? The development of factory farms where living creatures are so inhumanely mistreated at scale is a very recent development.

They probably misunderstood scale to mean something like “in the ways,” not more literally “by the numbers.” I’ve seen people suggest that we’re more savage and brutal towards animals these days on other websites, and I think that’s an absurd conclusion to draw because I don’t think we have sufficient evidence for it. It seems unquestionable that we’re doing it to more animals, though. There are more people eating far more animals these days. I suppose some might argue they aren’t suffering or something? That’s crazy, to me.

Ancient cheeses might have abused a larger variety of species given regional variations in prokaryotes.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9792889/

By the standards of modern "meatlovers" they might as well have been, given just how rarely they had meat.

It depends on where you lived whether you had large supplies of meat.

And even more on when you lived! Who are my "ancestors?" Big difference if we're talking about the ice age or the 18th Century.

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