From: wadley@mullauna.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Gregory Robert Wadley)
Subject: Re: Vegetarian Ethics?????????????????
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
Distribution: aus
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 06:55:10 GMT

guy@trofis.tfrc.csiro.au (Guy Carpenter) writes:

>Here's something I heard from a visiting scientist last year - I hope
>it doesn't distrupt this flame-fest though!

>This archaeologist who was visiting (name?  sorry.) has been working
>in Africa for many many years.  I believe he is working with the son
>of the Leakeys.  He mentioned that the point at which our ancestors
>started eating meat was roughly the same time they started spreading
>around the globe.

Probably this was Philip Tobias - he was out here last year.

>One hypothesis suggested was that people were not very successful at
>colonising new areas while they depended upon plants for food, possibly
>because the different plant communities required different specialised
>knowledge.

>But then came carno-man, who had an object-oriented gut.  While fruit/
>herb types vary greatly in food-value, toxins, availability, meat is
>pretty much meat. All you had to do was become an efficient and versatile
>hunter of warm furry things, and hit the road.  Well no, there actually
>was no road.

[rest of post deleted]

The question of where, when, and why people began to hunt animals, and with
what consequences, has been controversial for decades, e.g.:

Dart (1953) and Washburn (1968) supported the view that hunting was
"the driving force underlying the emergence and success of all later hominids"
(quote from Speth 1989).

Then various people (eg Brain 1981, Binford 1985) showed that the fossil
evidence was more compatible with scavenging, for bones, tendons, skins and
so on, to make things with, than with hunting for food.

Others showed that _early_ humans were either herbivorous or frugivorous, or
somewhere in between, depending on who you believe (eg Peters and Obrien 1981,
Jolly 1970, Dunbar 1976, Kay 1985, Walker 1981, Pilbeam 1984, Susman 1987).
Of course, this is compatible with Tobias's suggestion.

Speth (1989) showed that large amounts of meat are not healthy for humans,
and Lee and Devore (1968) said that at no stage in history has meat been a
large part of the diet,(excluding Eskimos and others in extreme climates),
even of people who call themselves 'hunters' and are proud of it.

Humans started to spread (so to speak) when they reached their modern
physiological form, between 30,000 and 100,000 years ago.
There are several factors associated with this, such as bigger brains,
tool use, and social organization, which could have caused both colonizing
success and the adoption of hunting, so that neither of the latter two
need be dependent on the other.

Anyway, there's lots of opinions, and little concensus.

This thread might be more at home in sci.anthropology.

Refs:

Binford (1985)			J.Arch.Anthr.4:292
Brain (1981)			The hunters or the hunted?
Dart (1953)			Int.Anthr.and Ling.Rev.1:201
Dunbar (1976)			J.Hum.Evol 5:161
Jolly (1970)			Man 5:5
Kay (1985)			Ann.Rev.Anthr.14:315
Lee and Devore (1968)		Man the hunter
Peters and Obrien (1981)	Curr.Anthr. 22:127-141
Pilbeam (1984)			Sci.Amer.250:60
Speth (1989)			J.Human.Evol 18:329-343
Susman (1987)			in Kinzey, "The evolution of human behaviour"
Walker (1981)			Phil.Trans.Roy.Soc.London B292:57
Washburn and Lancaster (1968)	in Lee and Devore "Man the hunter"
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