What is Reddit's opinion of A Prehistory of the North: Human Settlement of the Higher Latitudes?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Dear /u/SciNutrientSHEEEP,

As a new(er) subscriber to this group, I personally appreciate such discussions and in general I'm both pro-meat and pro-plants (because I'm pro whole foods in general and pro-omnivorism), however ...

> This subreddit is an ideological cesspool of vegan and plant based sheep

This is an ad hominem. It brings no value to this discussion.

From my personal experience in other groups:

1. be kind and generous, assume the best in people, we all share the same goals after all
2. stick to facts
3. be careful in assessing the value of your own opinions and anecdotes (be wary of the Dunning-Kruger effect) and I must say I failed to do this repeatedly

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> I hate to break it to all you, but humans are facultative carnivores that REQUIRE animal foods to be optimally healthy. Calling us omnivorous is a misrepresentation of our physiology and very definition of the word.

The primates we evolved from are herbivores. We got a big brain from eating high calorie foods, like animal fats, however we've been eating starchy roots ever since we discovered fire. We also have more genes related to processing starch than our ancestors. Yes, we evolved to consume meat and it's what made us human, but consuming plants, especially plants high in calories, like starch and fruits, is also what made us human.

Interestingly I remember seeing a paper on humans being fed raw meat and losing weight. A raw meat diet is not sustainable for us, we needed fire to make the nutrients in meat more available, just as we needed it for starch. We're born of fire.

See for example this paper on how control of fire enabled us to cook starches:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S004724840500093X

And not sure how evidence based the following presentation is, but I found the discussion on the availability of nutrients in wild plants interesting and should make you think:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9Cz0QTvBjo

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> We consumed plenty of plant foods during evolutionary history, but it was in the absence of animal foods and trying to procure calories to survive.

You have no evidence for this claim. This is a myth that keeps being perpetuated by carnivore proponents. Not only that but we do have indigenous, modern hunter gatherer populations studied:

• The islanders of Kitava are healthy on a diet of 69% carbs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9322559
• The Inuit alone have been observed to consume less 5% carbohydrate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2736000
  • Interestingly Alaska was colonized only 12,000 years ago and the Inuit arrived only 2,000 years ago — which makes them a neolithic population, hardly the population you want to consider for finding out how we ate in paleolithic (source)
  • Even they eat whatever plants they can find, berries, tubers, grasses, roots, seaweed
  • They trade for plants when not available too
• We have the Corrected ethnographic atlas that looked at 229 populations and we've got this analysis by Cordain et all suggesting that ...
  1. animal foods provided between 50 and 85% of energy
  2. the median group obtained 30% of energy from plant foods
  3. there are no carnivore or vegan populations observed, all of them were omnivores
  4. Note there is some debate whether this analysis is reliable

Calories from plant foods came from starchy in-ground plants, e.g. roots, rhizomes, tubers, and corms plus fat sources such as coconuts, palm fruit, and mongongo nuts. We are indeed not talking about sweet fruits.

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There's also evidence that paleolithic humans ate starch and even legumes and grains, even if the later were not a major calorie source until the neolithic. See:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248414000189

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Matter of fact is that we don't really know what or how the paleolithic human ate, all we have are some general clues. But all evidence we have suggests that we are true omnivores, including our digestive system. For example:

• carnivores make their own vitamin C, we don't
• our gastrointestinal tract is significantly longer than that of carnivores (source), but not as long as that of many herbivores
• and yes, we probably need animal protein for optimal health, because unlike cows we don't have a digestive system that can assemble protein from grass and we don't want to chew grass all day anyway

Btw, if you see vegans being sloppy in their opinions or the provided evidence, that's no excuse for carnivores to be superficial too.