Re: Article: Taste for meat made humans early weaners

From: firstjois (firstjoisyike_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 01/30/05 

Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 22:31:00 -0500

Robert Karl Stonjek wrote:
>> Taste for meat made humans early weaners
>> 19:00 26 January 2005
>>
>> Anna Gosline
>>
>> A taste for meat prompted early humans to wean their children at a
>> young age. The idea explains why we now wean our infants years
>> earlier than other great apes.
>>
>> In non-industrialised societies, women breastfeed their children for
>> an average of two and a half years, while chimpanzees feed theirs
>> for five. Anthropologist Gail Kennedy of the University of
>> California, Los Angeles, US, suggests that humans made the
>> transition to early weaning 2.6 million years ago.
>>
>> That was when a branch of hominids began to eat animal carcasses - a
>> risky activity that would have brought them into contact with other
>> predators and significantly raised mortality rates for the hunters.
>> This would have created a selection pressure to wean infants earlier
>> and earlier, since those no longer dependent on breast milk would
>> have been more likely to survive their mother's death, says Kennedy.
>>
>> What is more, the nutritional benefit of eating meat at a younger
>> age would have helped children's brains to grow and develop more
>> quickly. Human brains grow three times quicker than those of
>> chimpanzees.
>>
>> But Barry Bogin of the University of Michigan at Dearborn, US, has a
>> different rationale for early weaning. He believes it allowed hominid
>> mothers to have more offspring. "By weaning at 30 months, we have a
>> great reproductive jump over our closest cousins; we can crank out
>> two babies in the time it takes a chimpanzee to have one," he says.
>>
>> Journal reference: Journal of Human Evolution (DOI:
>> 10.1016/j.jhevol.2004.09.005)
>>
>> Full Text from NewScientist
>> http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6921
>>
>>
>> --
>> Posted by
>> Robert Karl Stonjek

Seems a little twisted. We traditionally see the men as the hunters and the
ones most at risk, not the females and certainly not females nursing
babies. So wouldn't the selection pressure be for bigger and stronger men?
Not the weaning of babies without teeth to chew meat? or who still needed
to have meat pre-chewed and popped into their mouths bit by bit? Breast
feeding might have been easier and more reliable.

If there is a difference in weaning age it would be more likely that the
first foods favored by mothers/infants of the different species were
available, digestable, suitable, were different, too.

Jois

Relevant Pages

  • taste for meat nonsense
    ... A taste for meat prompted early humans to wean their children at a young ... suggests that humans made the transition to early weaning 2.6 million ...
    (sci.anthropology.paleo)
  • Article: Taste for meat made humans early weaners
    ... A taste for meat prompted early humans to wean their children at a young ...
    (sci.anthropology.paleo)
  • Re: Vegan M.D. vs The Atkins Corporation
    ... >>humans are incapable of eating many kinds of plants. ... I'm eating mostly meat now, ... this closer-to-the-source food supply would have been exploited. ...
    (sci.med.nutrition)
  • Re: Humans as scavengers
    ... population that DOES ANY scavenging of rotten meat ?" ... The difference between canines and humans is that one is very ... Hence if you change brands of dog food, ... to develop the right intestinal bacteria before the dog can ...
    (sci.anthropology.paleo)
  • Re: What gave humans the brain - fish DHA not likely ...
    ... prove that eating red meat and natural animal fats while restricting ... It had been like this at the beginning, that's also the reason humans ... enough to adapt us to the refined grain diet during the neolithic ... thriving on animal fat and meat (sometimes blood group O - not yours I ...
    (sci.med.nutrition)