Paul Saladino· MD
Organs/meat have been at the center of our diet for 2 million years and were likely the catalyst for the rapid growth of our brains.
Loading…
The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
Organs/meat have been at the center of our diet for 2 million years and were likely the catalyst for the rapid growth of our brains.
Every Sunday: the week’s new conflicts and verdict changes — and nothing else.
Native comments, Twitter mentions, and Reddit threads about this claim — surfaced together so the conversation isn't fragmented across platforms.
Bookmarking — the dossier-vs-overview split is the right call. Most of the time I want overview; sometimes I want receipts.
Would love a "what would change this verdict" RSS feed. Sign me up if it exists.
if we look at the Paleo anthropologic record there's a pretty convincing story that it was the hunting of animals and the consumption of animals that made us human that allowed our brains to grow
I certainly believe that humans of an eating animal meat with saturated fat from throughout our entire evolution and I make sort of the the case in the book that it was the eating of meat that caused our brains to grow rapidly to two million years ago
if you've read my book you'll know that that I think personally is the thing that made us human that allowed our brains to grow
that the eating of meat and the special unique nutrients in meat drove the grain the gain in brain size and was the key factor there
so i think it's more plausible doesn't it seem more plausible that it was the eating of meat and organs by these scavengers and then hunters that allowed our brains to grow that allowed more nutrient-rich food to be consumed and absorbed allowing the trade-off between the gut specifically the large intestine and the brain to happen for 1.7 million years before we got fire
i think there's plenty of evidence that humans were breaking bones getting marrow whether it was omega-3 sure or other meat-based nutrients i mean the hadza ate brain i ate baboon brain with the hodges so any animal we killed we were getting the the brain and all the omega-3s and i think the omega-3s were part of a myriad collection of nutrients that allowed our brains to grow but i think it had nothing to do with cooking and certainly nothing to do with fiber because that doesn't come along so much later
when they start introducing meat into their diet we don't see huge biological changes we don't see we see a little bit there's a little bit of body size growth a little bit of brain size growth but we don't see these massive changes the massive changes happen when our ancestors start hunting and also control fire
we ate more meat and that may have been the spark that improved our nutrition and led to increases in the size of our brains
I believe animals and eating them was one of the key events that allowed us to become human we see this incredible increase in brain growth size about 2 million years ago when we started hunting more it's a correlation but it's quite compelling