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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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