Human Dietary Evolution

The cluster debates human evolutionary adaptations to diets, particularly whether humans are naturally omnivores who evolved to eat meat, cooked foods, and various plants, or if recent changes like grains and dairy represent maladaptations.

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Keywords

IPCC www.ncbi eurekalert.org B12 PMC5351833 nlm.nih DNA meat diet evolved diets humans milk food species eat ancestors

Sample Comments

GnarfGnarf β€’ Aug 18, 2022 β€’ View on HN

Yes, we evolved to eat meat, just not so much :o)

xyzzyz β€’ Jan 22, 2022 β€’ View on HN

No, we evolved to consume prepared food, including meat. Our mouths, jaws, and digestive system have been coevolving for past few tens-to-hundreds of thousands of years with our diets and food preparation methods. Certainly, vegetables have not been a major source of calories for humans in many tens of thousands of years now (because they don’t have a lot of calories in them in the first place, but also because they are only available in narrow window of the growing season.

asdff β€’ Jul 2, 2022 β€’ View on HN

You have canine teeth for eating meat instead of tree fruits. Your body can also extract nutrients from this fungus versus merely passing it like if you ate some wood or something else entirely non-nutritious. You might be one of those people who are able to process lactose effectively. None of these things are unnatural to our species if we have natural mutations in our population that confer these adaptions.

defen β€’ Mar 5, 2011 β€’ View on HN

It's amazing, thousands of years ago, with no concept at all of nutrition, people managed to put together fantastically complete (and tasty) diets.I can't tell if you're being really subtle here, but the causality is probably reversed - people ate whatever they could get away with, and over the course of many tens of thousands of years they evolved to process that food efficiently. Anatomically modern humans evolved approximately 200,000 years ago, and agriculture was only invented 10

danlugo92 β€’ Aug 3, 2024 β€’ View on HN

Humans didn't evolve to eat seeds, if anything, we the ones that can tolerate them are the mutations.

toasterlovin β€’ Oct 12, 2018 β€’ View on HN

Lion diets haven't changed since lions became a distinct species. Human diets have changed drastically in the last 10k years. And there are well known examples of humans evolving adaptations to changing diets (lactase persistence in Northern Europeans being the most obvious). It would be crazy to think that other, less obvious adaptations to diet haven't occurred in basically every other region with a distinct diet.

cynicalkane β€’ Mar 19, 2013 β€’ View on HN

Modern humanity evolved to eat tubers in the last few centuries?

asciimo β€’ Sep 2, 2011 β€’ View on HN

We didn't evolve to eat happy meals, pizza, and onion rings, either. We evolved to exploit of a broad spectrum of foods, and this new food will probably fall within that spectrum.

sonnyblarney β€’ Feb 25, 2019 β€’ View on HN

By 'we' - he means essentially every culture and most humans throughout history.We are essentially omnivorous by nature.We mostly all ate meat, not just 'some rural people'.We literally evolved around it, so it's part of our composition in a very, very fundamental way.

oilywater β€’ Jan 18, 2016 β€’ View on HN

Our ancestors at one point in time had a diet consisting 60-80% of animal flesh. Do you think that this is what nature solved? I mean, technology has given us a way to rise above the evolution.We do not have claws, or teeth that could pierce an elephant, lion, gazelle. It doesn't seem that nature solved anything. Or us, drinking cows milk? Did nature solve the digestion of human to consume milk of another mammal? Was this a thing in past. I do not think so.