Slashdot Mirror
How Sliced Meat May Have Driven Human Evolution (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: The most tedious part of a chimpanzee's life is chewing. Our primate cousins spend six hours a day gnashing fruits and the occasional monkey carcass — all made possible by the same type of big teeth and large jaws our early ancestors had. So why are our own teeth and jaws so much smaller? A new study credits the advent of simple stone tools to slice meat and pound root vegetables, which could have dramatically reduced the time and force needed to chew, thus allowing our more immediate ancestors to evolve the physical features required for speech. The abstract for the (paywalled) article is more informative than many.
Surprised they didn't mention that a longer lasting tooth would have been a huge advantage as well:
"Slicing, whether with a knife or a sharp stone flake, changes all that. Suddenly, hominins could cut up the elastic muscles of a carcass into smaller bits before putting them in their mouths, making them chewable and easier to digest. Pounding has a similar effect on tough, fibrous root vegetables. “What we found is that by simply slicing meat and pounding vegetables, a hominin would be able to reduce the number of chews they use by about 17%,” Zink says. “That equates to 2-and-a-half million fewer chews per year.”
Imagine a 17% less worn tooth. Tooth loss is a huge disadvantage in the wild, just look at how desperate large predators get when they cannot hunt effectively.
An individual living 17% longer would be able to learn and pass on their knowledge and build a more effective society, perhaps even helping invent fire along the way.
It's amazing what you'd be willing to eat when the alternative's pilot bread.
Small teeth can just as easily eat a whole animal as big teeth. Teeth aren't just used for chewing but for attacking and taking down prey. It was tools that allowed humans to take down prey without the need for biting that allowed smaller mouths to be evolutionarily OK.
And beyond that, COOKING the meat was far more advantageous than tools to slice it.
"Sliced bread makes us evolutionarily superior"
Yeesh.. this isn't science, this is drunken bar talk...
Putting it in the bottom of a bowl before filling it with lobscouse will render it edible by the time you're down to it. Or you can pound it back to flour, mix it with suet and some leavening, and bake it again to make duff, or bag the dough and boil it to make pudding duff.
Knives don't really replace chewing, fire does that.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Sounds great! I would like to subscribe to your cooking blog.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
And the other small factor they missed.. Cooking!
Cooking has a large known effect on consumption and abduction of food. Especially meat. Resulting in needing to eat less quantity and being easier to chew..
No.. That couldn't be a factor.. Must have been those thin slices. Sigh.
Chewing cooked food is much much easier.. Making a larger difference than sliced meat (you don't think stone tools produce nice thin slices do you?)
Sounds a lot like someone flash of the moment idea that they rushed to publish rather than something with much backing
I always thought they were for building emergency shelters....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I don't spend this much time on many things like this but for some reason this came across as bad science.
A session with Google and no knowledge anthropology I found this:
Chimpanzee's habit was an entire Continent away from H. erectus
http://www.janegoodall.ca/abou...
(not that big of a deal we do have Hurricanes, Cyclones and Typhoons to mix the groups)
Chimpanzee's are a different time line than humans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So what do the modern apes—and in particular our closest relatives the chimpanzees and bonobos—eat? Plants. Yes, plants. ... But most chimps don’t eat such meaty treats often. Three percent of the average chimp diet comes from meat. On average, nine days a year are meat days for chimps.
http://blogs.scientificamerica...
Despite their hunting behavior, however, only a very tiny percentage–perhaps as small as two percent–of a wild chimp’s diet consists of meat or insects.
http://www.allaboutwildlife.co...
Google this phrase: what do you feed a chimpanzee - give one this blurb:
It also eats leaves and leaf buds. Seeds, blossoms, stems, pith, bark and resin, insects, and meat make up the rest of its diet. While the common chimpanzee is mostly herbivorous, it does eat honey, soil, insects, birds and their eggs, and small to medium-sized mammals, including other primates.
http://www.janegoodall.org/ is a worthless site unless you wish to give money.
Topic: H. erectus meat consumption is associated with __________.
Not one answer includes teeth
http://science-forums.com/inde...
The only thing that associates chimpanzee (meat eating) and evolve of humans jaws to is the submitted article itself.
Or dwarf bread for that matter
So is religion. The only reason it's not a mental illness is that the definition of delusion explicitly exempts religion.
Still, there's millions of people suffering from it. And unlike homosexuality, millions who do not share that mental illness have to suffer from it, too.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.