It must have felt unnatural at first, to eat animal flesh.
After all, we’re not so far removed from animals ourselves. Perhaps it even
felt cannibalistic. There might not have been that much intellectual
distinction between humans and other animals. When humans were pure
vegetarians, they were living in harmony with the earth and with the other
creatures co-habiting the planet with them. Their closest animal relatives,
apes, were vegetarians. Eating the products of the earth, like plants, grains
and fruits that they could gather and eat would have seemed the natural order
of things.
But necessity is the mother of invention. Prehistoric men
who lived in frozen geographies, or who lived in an area that became devastated
by fire, would have eaten anything to survive. Just like the soccer players
whose plane crashed in the mountains of Chile, and were forced to eat the flesh
of other players who died in the crash, earliest man at some point had to make
the choice for survival, and that could have consuming meat for the first time
and changing human history – and health – forever.
We can imagine that men first ate meat that had been charred
or cooked by virtue of being caught in a natural forest fire. They might have
subsequently eaten raw meat, if necessary, but we can also imagine that our
earliest digestive systems rebelled against eating raw meat.
Imagine having eaten raw foods and vegetables for eons, and
all of a sudden, incorporating meat products into your system. You may have
heard friends who were vegetarians tell stories of trying to eat meat and
becoming violently ill afterwards.
Biologists will tell you we’re really not designed to eat
meat, but we adapted to it. However, in the timeline of human history, eating
meat is a relatively recent evolutionary development.
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