Friday, January 5, 2007

Predators or not?

I read an interesting comment from some blog where the poster said:

"Primates have binocular vision so they can judge the distance between branches, not so they can judge distance to prey"

I am not sure if this is true but it does have a ring of common sense. I mean, besides frontal eyes we lack all the equipment that predators have. However it seems that early humans hunted and the real edge was that we have a lot of endurance; we could not outrun most of the prey but we can exhaust it (basically the animal overheats and stops running) and then while it tries to recover kill it. This of course requires group hunting, good strategy and a lot of team coordination.

Also it seems that our digestive system (and our teeth) is better suited for a vegetarian diet as you can see in many primate species.

So now I have taken the stance that we are vegetarian by construction/legacy but hunters by relative recent evolutionary pressure (by having the required intelligence, almost no body hair and sophisticated vocal tract).

I guess I have found myself back into the middle-school definition of humans as omnivores, but at least I have now the distint feeling that we should eat meat in moderation, that is, very little of it.

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