Eating Meat Made Us Human

Sorry, vegans; evolutionists tell us that eating meat 1.5 million years ago made us what we are today.

In “Anthropologist Finds Evidence of Hominin Meat Eating 1.5 Million Years Ago: Eating Meat May Have ‘Made Us Human’,” Science Daily swallowed the evolutionary line without asking where’s the beef.  “A skull fragment unearthed by anthropologists in Tanzania shows that our ancient ancestors were eating meat at least 1.5 million years ago, shedding new light into the evolution of human physiology and brain development.”

If meat eating made us human, what does that make T. rex?  Lots of animals ate meat.  Carnivores go way back.  Didn’t the anthropologist consider that?

“Meat eating has always been considered one of the things that made us human, with the protein contributing to the growth of our brains,” said Charles Musiba, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver, who helped make the discovery. “Our work shows that 1.5 million years ago we were not opportunistic meat eaters, we were actively hunting and eating meat.“

But lots of carnivores hunt their meat.  That’s what makes a carnivore a carnivore and not just a scavenger.  Is hunting meat what makes eagles human?

Somehow Musiba built his conclusion on a malnourished juvenile “hominin,” as inferred from the skull fragment. The reader looks in vain for deeper thinking about this than the headline suggested.

The study offers insights into the evolution of hominins including Homo sapiens. Musiba said the movement from a scavenger, largely plant-eating lifestyle to a meat-eating one may have provided the protein needed to grow our brains and give us an evolutionary boost.

Some scientists have argued that we became human when we became carnivorous-omnivorous creatures.

“Meat eating is associated with brain development,” he said. “The brain is a large organ and requires a lot of energy. We are beginning to think more about the relationship between brain expansion and a high protein diet.”

Certainly a T. rex or a lion eats much more protein per ounce of brain than a human does.  How can Musiba say such things?  How can Science Daily publish it uncritically?  Musiba says that chimpanzees have smaller brains and eat less meat, but nowhere did he apply his notion to the large carnivores that have inhabited earth.

He may be convinced of his hypothesis: he said that our meat eating “separates us from our distant cousins.”  But he also can’t explain why our ancestors went to the meat market: “The question is what triggered our meat eating? Was it a changing environment? Was it the expansion of the brain itself? We don’t really know.”

This story is so full of baloney it’s hard to know where to start slicing.  First, he says meat eating made us human (ignoring all the other carnivores that ever stalked the earth).  But then he offers the idea that the expansion of the brain came first. This guy needs an evolutionary boost, all right; a boost out of the garbage bin he’s in.

So let’s just take him at his word.  “We don’t really know”  (the “we” referring to himself and his fellow baloney sellers).  Science Daily knows even less, because the editors didn’t call him on it.  What do you do with people who don’t know what they’re talking about?  Ignore them.

We can’t ignore the sad fact, however, that thousands of people read this kind of baloney and think it is wonderful science.

Assignment: Feed meat to a guinea pig, wait a million years, and see if it starts writing books on logic.