taste for meat nonsense

From: Marc Verhaegen (fa204466_at_skynet.be)
Date: 01/30/05 

Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 13:23:03 +0100

(my comments between [ ] - MV)

Taste for meat made humans early weaners
09:30 29 January 2005
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition
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.

[The idea explains nothing, but if you repeat nonsense frequently enough, al
least some people will believe it... Our locomotion, gastro-intestinal
tract, dentition etc. say we are no meat-eaters. Of course, we eat meat when
we find it, but our bodies are primarily those of omnivores, more
specifically durophagous omnivores.]

In non-industrialised societies, women breastfeed their children for an
average of two and a half years, while chimpanzees feed theirs for five.

[Yes, and chimps are the most-meat-eating apes if not primates (apart from
insectivorous primates)...]

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.

[Are there indications that early weaning predates agriculture?]

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.

[Is it so risky IMO to butcher stranded whales? or herbivores drowned when
crossing rivers? I guess the inland sidebranches of Homo had to feed on the
very difficult-to-obtain bone marrow (often left by carnivores), because
their seaside diet had been so rich in brain-specific fatty acids that their
large brains badly needed these. A bit of these fatty acids could be found
in bone marrow - not in meat.]

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.

[A prime example of wishful thinking.]

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.

[Yes, and that's not because we eat meat, of course, but because our
ancestors had plenty of brain-specific fatty acids in their littoral diet.]

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.

[BB confuses hominids & humans. And doesn't explain why humans could have
more offspring. Agriculture??]

Journal reference: Journal of Human Evolution (DOI:
10.1016/j.jhevol.2004.09.005)
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6921

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