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Old Tue, Mar-07-06, 10:31
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Paleoanth Paleoanth is offline
Slothy Superhero
Posts: 12,159
 
Plan: Vegetarian Atkins
Stats: 165/145/125 Female 60 inches
BF:29/25.2/24
Progress: 50%
Location: Tennessee/Iowa
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TheCaveman
First of all, you're presuming that a million years ago, Homo had a problem getting food. To presume that a species as successful as ours had a problem getting food is kind of silly. Don't forget that a million years ago, food was free, or at least as cheap as effort using skills that we evolved with. Everything alive is built to get food, and we are masters at getting food. Adjunct to that is a very active (among animals) storage metabolism that makes good use of lean times, of which every living thing has has mitigation. Lean times are at worst episodic and must be presumed to be seasonal. But a chronic deficit over a million years means only one thing: adapt or die out. Ancient humans adapted to the environments they live in, and the proof is that we are still here.


It was not cheap, in terms of caloric expenditure, to get food. It was very costly even though we evolved a more efficient locomotion to deal with larger ranges than our primate ancestors. Plus our larger brains, longer juvenile periods and larger bodies demanded higher calories in order to just survive. This is why we needed higher quality foods:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/...4&dopt=Abstract

http://www.johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/erectus

http://www.cas.northwestern.edu/ant...erican-2002.pdf

http://www.cofc.edu/~huberb/Reading...%20Activity.pdf
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