The Monitor Daily

Tuesday, January 26, 2021
Log in

As a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, this site may earn from qualifying purchases. We may also earn commissions on purchases from other retail websites.

  • Home
  • Politics & National News
  • Business News
  • Tech & Science
  • Health & Lifestyle
  • About us
    • Contact US
    • Privacy Policy GDPR
    • Terms of Use
  • Latest News
    • Stormy Planet
    • US Surgeon Performs Face Transplant
    • 2017 MTV VMAs Nominations Are In And Voting Is Now Open
    • Bright House: Free McAfee AntiVirus and Adult Controls
    • Antarctic Yeti Crab Gets Formal Scientific Name
    • Spiders Take Over Australian Town
    • Interesting Facts About the Apollo 11 Mission
    • Social Smoking or The New Landmark of Elegance Among Young Women
    • Rare Weasel Returns To Washington State

Pages

  • About The Monitor Daily
  • Contact US
  • Our Team
  • Privacy Policy GDPR
  • Terms of Use

Recent Posts

  • Precisely what is Administration Buyback? Feb 12, 2020
  • Precisely what is Administration Buyback? Feb 12, 2020
  • Where by do Registered requests get kept Dec 1, 2019
  • Find a Star of the event on the Submit Purchase New bride List May 19, 2019
  • Locate Really enjoy On the internet Apr 30, 2019
  • Get Love On the net Apr 12, 2019
  • NYC Man Snaps Photo of the Victim After Sucker-Punching Him in Broad Daylight Jun 29, 2018

Processed Meat Molded the Course of Human Evolution

By 2 Comments

"processed meat"

“So… what kind of meat were you talking about?”

Many things have influenced our species’ evolution over the years, some much more than others. And while some would argue that some long ago practices were barbaric and that they should also be abolished today, a team of researchers from Harvard concluded that processed meat molded the course of human evolution.

Well, it wasn’t processed meat itself as much as the techniques and tools developed for processing meat. Still, if we never decided to start having an easier time eating the meat of the animals we caught, we might never have developed our current language skills and we might have even had more limited motor functions.

While over 2.5 million years ago hominids, our ancestors, were perfected chewing machines, a shift in our diets caused us to start changing. We started losing our huge teeth and jaws, as well as our powerful chewing muscles, and our mouths started getting smaller and our brains and bodies started getting bigger.

This shift paradoxically determined a need for a far higher energy intake, so we shifted to eating more meat. Scientists still disagree whether the increased number of nutrients came from eating more meat or from the invention of cooking. Still, jaws kept smaller and brains kept getting bigger.

Daniel Lieberman of the Harvard University in Massachusetts, co-author of the study had this to say:

So one big question is ‘What did humans do before they regularly had access to cooking?’ […] What we’re arguing really is that simple processing could have made possible the selection that we see in the fossil record for smaller teeth, jaws and chewing muscles. This kind of change could be beneficial for a variety of adaptations such as the ability to speak better, to have better language abilities… maybe better locomotor function (movement).

In order to test how well our current evolutionary form fares against various types of food eaten by those prehistoric humans, Lieberman and his colleague Katherine Zink performed an experiment in which they observed people chewing those types of foods – yams, beets, carrots, and goat meat.

The participants had to chew these foods in different forms – raw or cooked, whole, sliced, or pounded with stone tools, etc. As expected, the participants didn’t do so well at chewing raw and unprocessed meat, while the more processed and cooked the food got, the easier it was to masticate.

Concluding that not the meat itself but the processes used in preparing it had a huge effect in our evolution, Zink ended by saying the following:

What we found is that by simply slicing meat and pounding vegetables, a hominin would be able to reduce chewing effort by about 17 percent.

Image source: Wikimedia

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr

Filed Under: Tech & Science

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 34 other subscribers

Operation Paperclip

Remembering Georg von Tiesenhausen, Last Member of Von Braun’s Rocket Team

By Leave a Comment

giant ground sloths on white background

It Seems that Giant Sloths Once Roamed Earth, and Humans Used to Hunt Them? (Study)

By Leave a Comment

sn 2001ig supernova explosion and images of its stars

A Star Escaped a Supernova Explosion, and NASA Snapped its Picture

By Leave a Comment

ngc 6420 galaxy resembling a giant butterfly

Hubble Spots Giant Butterfly Formed by a Black Hole and Stellar Winds (Study)

By Leave a Comment

infrared image of a dog

Space Technology Could Help Protect Earth’s Endangered Species

By Leave a Comment

snake slithering on a beige background

Kirigami Skin Is Helping a Soft Robot Slither Like a Snake (Study)

By Leave a Comment

woolly mammoth

Ice Age Tracks Reveal How Young Mammoths Cared for Adult Ones (Study)

By Leave a Comment

High Priestess tomb.

Archaeologists Discovered 4400-Years-Old High Priestess Tomb Near Cairo

By Leave a Comment

dwarf galaxies

Dwarf Galaxies Challenge the Entire Dark Matter Cosmology (Study)

By Leave a Comment

NASA Scientists and Food Experiments

NASA Scientists to Test if Astronauts Could Eat Their Own Poo

By Leave a Comment

KFC Smoky Wings Box Can Turn into Awesome Drone

By Leave a Comment

Tesla Model S

Tesla Model S Involved in Autopilot Malfunction Accident

By Leave a Comment

Duke Nukem.

John Cena Cold Feature in Duke Nukem Movie

By Leave a Comment

Battlefield One

Battlefield One Apocalypse DLC to Land in February

By Leave a Comment

Related Articles

  • Operation Paperclip

    Remembering Georg von Tiesenhausen, Last Member of Von Braun’s Rocket Team

  • giant ground sloths on white background

    It Seems that Giant Sloths Once Roamed Earth, and Humans Used to Hunt Them? (Study)

  • sn 2001ig supernova explosion and images of its stars

    A Star Escaped a Supernova Explosion, and NASA Snapped its Picture

  • ngc 6420 galaxy resembling a giant butterfly

    Hubble Spots Giant Butterfly Formed by a Black Hole and Stellar Winds (Study)

  • infrared image of a dog

    Space Technology Could Help Protect Earth’s Endangered Species

  • snake slithering on a beige background

    Kirigami Skin Is Helping a Soft Robot Slither Like a Snake (Study)

  • woolly mammoth

    Ice Age Tracks Reveal How Young Mammoths Cared for Adult Ones (Study)

  • High Priestess tomb.

    Archaeologists Discovered 4400-Years-Old High Priestess Tomb Near Cairo

  • dwarf galaxies

    Dwarf Galaxies Challenge the Entire Dark Matter Cosmology (Study)

  • NASA Scientists and Food Experiments

    NASA Scientists to Test if Astronauts Could Eat Their Own Poo

Categories

  • Business News
  • Entertainment
  • Featured
  • Health & Lifestyle
  • Nature
  • Politics & National
  • Sports
  • Tech & Science
  • US
  • World

Copyright © 2021 TheMonitorDaily.com

About · Privacy Policy · Terms of Use · Sitemap · Contact

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Learn more.