Scardoc said:
Sid Bonkers said:
And how many grass fed bison did paleo man stumble across? I accept that all animals have fat just as skinny humans do but paleo man could not have lived off it, if you kill an animal for food you dont eat the fat first do you you eat the stuff you can chew and actually eat the scavengers are the ones left with the fat, bone and gristle, not the predator.
You didnt answer my question about venison Stephen?
We're assuming that our ancestors killed the animals themselves. Prior to the development of tools it could very well be the case that we were the scavengers. Also, it begs the question: just how would a tool-less man (we all know a few of those!
) carve up and take his choice cuts to the cave larder? He couldn't. Like any wild animal he would have to gorge on what he could before something bigger and scarier came along and said "beat it skinny". Perhaps the only animals that could be taken and eaten in their entirety were smaller ones?
Obviously evolution would introduce tools, fire and teamwork and the options available to man would increase enormously.
The proto-humans at Olduvai Gorge were making crude stone tools with edges that had been used for cutting. Yes, they certainly would have scavenged (so do lions!) and gathering would have produced a fair proportion of the diet, including some root carbohydrates, grains and fruits
in season. That's up to 350,000+ years ago!
Once we were properly out of Africa we spread into Europe as Homo Sapiens Sapiens, what we now count as "human". Much of the time we were pushed back and forth by the various glaciations. I can't for the moment remember the date of Boxgrove Man (Kent, I think - should be engraved on my subconscious!), but there is a Palaeolithic stone handaxe from the Gower Peninsula that dates to 75,000 BP.
Permanent colonisation of what we now call the British Isles didn't really start until about 15,000 years ago, at the retreat of the last glaciation. The cultures in southern France and Spain that produced the most famous cave art flourished around 40,000 years ago. Homo sap sap has had a long time to evolve, and for most of that time has been a hunter-gatherer. We know they were using mammoths (and there were mammoths in our region, look at the finds trawled up from the Dogger Bank) all across North Europe - and mammoths didn't live outside of cold latitudes, similar to the modern northern steppes. There's not much to eat in those latitudes if you can't digest grass, even in the short spring and summer.
Our big brains were developing with us, fuelled by fat, and produced a social animal that learned quickly how to co-operate for survival. The animal I think has the greatest similarity to humans in that respect is the wolf - no wonder we get on so well with their descendants. The earliest domesticated dog so far known in the world is about 9,000 years ago, at Starr Carr in Yorkshire.
At Boxgrove there's evidence of animals (horses, I think) being chased over cliffs - easy then to kill the injured and have a great harvest of raw materials - skins, tail and mane hair, bones, hooves and sinews, as well as the meat and fat. As my great-granny used to say of pigs - "the only bit you can't use is the squeak".
As for game animals not being fat - those in northern (or southern) latitudes have to have fat to see them through the winter. How do you think a female anything - let's take horses - can carry and grow a foal through the winter to give birth to it in spring, fully developed and able to run in less than an hour, if she doesn't have fat stores?
I hate ethnographic parallels, but if you want a Palaeolithic culture living off grass-fed bison, look no further than the Plains Indians of North America. They didn't suddenly start hunting when they got horses - they'd lived off bison for thousands of years before that. Yes, they hunted and gathered and had a varied diet, fruits and some grain
in season. But bison was their staple animal - they even made their teepees and footwear of bison skins. They hunted deer, used the skins to make their clothes. You can 'stalk' deer just as well with a bow & arrow as with a rifle!
I can't emphasise
in season too much. All mammals living in the equatorial regions, including us, possibly don't need to get fat 'cos they don't really have seasons. Food all year round. As soon as you get to higher and lower latitudes, you have to adjust to seasonality.
The Masaai lived on meat, blood and milk as the basis of their diet. The Eskimos lived on fish, meat and fat. The Australian Aboriginals lived as pure hunter-gatherers, with a different suite of prey animals and resources. All before us civilised Westerners got to them, to give them flour and sugar and alcohol - oh, and our diseases including diabetes! Which was virtually unknown, certainly among the Eskimo, before they adopted a Western diet.
See "Weston Price:
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration; A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects 2010, Benediction Classics, Oxford ISBN 978-1-84902-770-0
and Vilhjalmur Stefansson
My Life with the Eskimo first published 1913 Macmillan & Co, New York. Reproduced recently by Book Jungle, New York. ISBN 1-59462-651-0
As far as statins are concerned - well, I actually
asked to go on statins 'cos I'd heard some research that said they protected against Alzheimer's. I think that has now been reversed - Google 'Stephanie Senneff' for a paper about that. By the time I found that out, the damage to my joints and muscles had been done.
Viv 8)
