Break The Fast

I’m reading Ian Tattersall’s excellent but pretentiously entitled Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Ancestors. It is serious food for thought. But you may not want to read this post during breakfast…

Our hominid ancestors of some two million years ago were far from top dog; in fact, they were the prey of a number of apex predators. But they also ate carrion killed by those predators. It is theorized that, working in large groups, they would chase off the predators and hold them at bay while others scraped meat off bones and smashed bones for the marrow. Besides evidence of cut marks on animal bones, there’s also this chemical evidence: the carbon isotope pathway in grasses is different from the pathway in most other plants, and since we are what we eat, the residue of these different forms of carbon can be measure in fossilized bones. Eaters of a vegetarian diet and eaters of meat (from grazers of grass) show it in their bones. But here’s where it gets really interesting: it was once assumed that tapeworms joined the human family with the domestication of animals like cattle, but tapeworms and hominids got together much farther back in time. Hominids probably picked up these intestinal parasites from the carcasses they shared with predators (of which there were many more species then), which included those predators’ remnant saliva, a vector, on the corpses.

We humans have large brains and small digestive systems for our size compared to other mammals. A high protein diet rich in animal fats seems to be responsible for both of these unusual characteristics. H. ergaster from 1.6 million years ago, seems to have had the body of a runner, and hairless humans can take the heat better than haired mammals, as long as there’s water available, so the notion of chasing down prey has been suggested. On the question of when hominids lost their body hair, public and head lice parted genetic ways circa three to four million years ago. And then there’s fish, high in Omega-3, another fine brain food. Raw fish is sushi, but raw meat is rather harder to digest, and requires a predator’s stomach, which genus Homo never seems to have had. So when did cooking come into the picture? Cooking foods animal and vegetable, raw food cultists notwithstanding, makes the nutrients in those foods more available to us. But evidence for fire isn’t really conclusive until 800,000 years ago in what we now call the Middle East, and that is an anomaly. Consistent evidence of fire comes in several hundred thousands years after that.
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Certainly the most haunting thing about our ancestors is that at any given time in the last couple of million years, Earth had more than one hominid species on it at the same time. This seems to have been true until up to about 14,000 years ago, when the last of Homo floresiensis became extinct. The better-known Neanderthals petered out some 30,000 years ago. It’s unusual for a mammal genus to be represented by only species. These spans of time aren’t even blinks geologically, although they push the limits of human comprehension.

We humans are particularly cooperative amongst ourselves, Republican ideologues aside, and uniquely socially-orientated, libertarians to the contrary, but, knowing ourselves as no other animal can know itself, can we assume these aspects of our personality and culture did not apply to similar but different life forms?