What Did We Evolve To Eat?

31 thoughts on “What Did We Evolve To Eat?”

1. Sign up for a 14-day free trial and enjoy all the amazing features MyHeritage has to offer: https://bit.ly/History_of_Humankind

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2. Meat and two veg.. stood the test of time.

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3. At the end of the day, animals gonna eat what they can, when they can. After you've seen a deer, a cow or any other supposed herbivore tearing a snake apart, or trying to eat a little rodent, you realise these labels 'herbivore' and 'carnivore' are general at best, and misleading at worst.

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4. Omnivore

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5. Physical human biology, millions of artifacts, we are hunter gathers. Accept it or not, but you must live with the facts, unless you want to pretend otherwise. Please don't hate the Inuit…

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6. Excellent content and narration. Love these historic type videos on human existence.

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7. And I thought History of the Earth was my favorite channel. Really well done! Again! ❤🎉

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8. Look what we evolved to eat now. Mcdonalds hamburgers and their cocaine french fries. Subway sandwhiches, hot dogs, chips, cake and ice cream. Humans looking fatter and greasier than ever sitting at a desk all day at a job they hate making pennies on the dollar.. massively overweight or obese and depressed. No sunlight, hardly connect with nature living in the stressful concrete jungle called cities.. riots and wars and murder everywhere. This evolution thing is really going well for us man…

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9. Gorillas have large canines yet have a vegetarian diet.

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10. Fantastic video as always 👍🏻

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11. Everything

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12. There is no evolution.

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13. I think we need some anthropologists in Australia.
    There is plenty of evidence to say the tribes were farming before 20000 years ago.

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14. A very good overview in general. However, there were some issues with this one. The biggest omission — by far — was the lack of discussion of the human intestinal microbiome. I understand that we know very little at this point, but we do know for a fact that microbes do much of the digestion and prepare nutrients for absorption in our colons. Like the dietary adaptations seen in different ethnic groups around the world, our microbiomes play a major role at the regional level as well as the health issues facing recently monocultured human populations.

    Otherwise, I'll focus my critique on the last chapter, "Food for Thought," since that's where 99% of the questionable material resides:

    @45:30 – "Some doubt whether our smaller-brained forebears were up to the task of building and managing fire." — The only anthropologists who would say this are the ones not observant enough to notice five- and six-year-old children in many parts of the world managing bonfires and cooking fires while the adults handle other tasks. Regardless, I thought this channel was helping move us away from the false "big brains are everything" ideology. Maybe not?

    @47:50 – The majority of humans alive today rely on agriculture for one obvious reason: agriculturalists the world over have persecuted hunter-gatherers (H-G) for millennia. You can find it everywhere, not just in today's populations, which have hostile and racist views of their H-G neighbors, but also in genetic histories. For example, Southeast Asian and European populations both show that agriculturalists and H-G people did not mate with each other, and H-G people were pushed towards extinction. In the rare cases where mingling did occur (in Europe), anthropology and genetics reveal that agriculturalists slaughtered H-G people and stole surviving girls for mates. The world's first genocide began with agriculture and its claims to superiority.

    @48:18 – Thank you for pointing out at least a few of the downsides of switching to agriculture. Unfortunately, you missed many, many others. In fact, the switch to agriculture brought so many ill effects that some anthropologists have wondered why they stuck with it. Overcrowding, pandemics, weaker jaws, and teeth alignment issues were just a small part of it. Most of our serious health and social issues today began with agriculture and civilization. At the very least, you could have pointed out that life expectancy actually dropped with the dawn of farming, and it didn't pick up again until the 1900s with the discovery of antibiotics. (BTW, life expectancy estimates for H-G people are often biased because anthropologists count infanticide in H-G people who are controlling their population as "child mortality," but exclude abortion and similar population control in civilized people.)

    @51:00 – "And if modern humans hadn't started farming, we might not have plagues or high blood pressure, but we might not also have cities or the wide range of rich cultures we have today." — That last little bit is quite offensive. In truth, the extermination of hunter-gatherer cultures decreased our cultural diversity significantly. They were more diverse than civilized humans will ever be. You can use the conclusion of this entire episode to deduce that, if anthropological fact isn't enough: Our diet shapes everything about us (including our culture), and since H-G people had a much richer variety of diets (tied to microclimates), they would have had much richer culture, as opposed to civilized humans, who universally subsist on agriculture (and a very narrow range of crops, at that).

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15. ❤

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16. Being omnivorous means that we can eat almost anything we want. I just choose plants personally. but hey if they want to eat meat then I can’t stop them.

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17. I'm becoming far less tolerant of adverts on YouTube recently. Double ads at the start, mid-roll ads… more and more I greet these events by simply switching off and doing something else instead.
    BUT… There are some videos that I still want to see enough to stomach (no pun intended) the ads… And History of Humankind and (should it ever come back) History of the Earth are certainly in the latter group… Excellent as ever!

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18. Humans are the ultimate omnivores

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19. Basically we are so adaptable that there are plenty of ways we can get our nutrition. That's why biological determinism arguments from people who say we have to eat or not eat meat because of our evolution are wrong. Those are a matter of culture, ideology and ethics determining our way of life, and in a sense there's nothing more naturally human than that.

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20. In 1989 (occupied) Palestine* suffered a drought.

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21. Nowadays, Big Food corporations and governments have educated and economically forced people to believe that humans were evolved to eat glyphosate, water with a splash of fluoride, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Aspartame, Red 40, Splenda, Acesulfame potassium, highly refined vegetable oils, deep fried foods, substantial amounts of a variety of carbohydrate food substances, sodas, dollar menu fast food, monosodium glutamate and hard liquor. Clearly, humanity's brains are devolving.

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22. Awesome production, this channel is going places. Keep up the amazing content!

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23. I like to eat food

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24. We left the trees to eat meat.
    We got smarter to eat meat.
    Our bodies evolved to run and make and throw things to eat meat.

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25. Before I watch; guessing the answer is "it depends".

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26. microscopes visualizing isotopes in a strand of hair
    …. I'm not convinced

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27. We evolved to eat food

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28. Both of course. That's why we have different teeth. Stupid question.

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29. Vegetables are trying to kill you

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30. Some of our ancestors such as paranthropus boisei ate things like roots that required a strong jawbone to chew while others like habilus were able to scavenge meat and yet others like agaster were able to hunt with a persistence predation life style. It all depends on where our ancestors broke the mild and decided on an omnivorous diet where they could easily rethink their menus. I learned a lot of this on the walking with cavemen series so i apologize if it isn't quite up to date but i just found it fascinating. If anyone wanted to dive in its a pretty good series breaking down our non human primate ancestors onward.

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31. I wonder if the fact that homo sapiens produce more than 10 x the amylase of any other great ape might tell us something about what we are adapted to eat? 🤔
    Or the fact that this adaptation enabled hominids to exploit an abundant food source that was plentiful beyond equatorial regions, encouraging migration into colder latitudes? 🤔
    Or whether the caloric surplus afforded by the exploitation of starchy food sources lent itself to more complex evolutionary and behavioural legacies? 🤔
    In fact, I posit that starch played a more important evolutionary role than opportunistic consumption of meat. And that the amylase mutation was the catalyst for ALL the evolutionary changes you attribute to meat consumption. Complex language, culture, tools, persistence hunting are all products of a big carbohydrate hungry brain, which in turn is the legacy of the caloric surplus afforded to us by the capacity to digest starch.

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