3 Why did humans begin to eat meat?
Eating animal flesh must have felt strange at first. After all, we’re not all that different from animals. It might have even felt cannibalistic. Humans and other animals may not have had much of an intellectual distinction. When humans were pure vegetarians, they lived in harmony with the earth and the other creatures who shared their planet. Apes, their closest animal relatives, were vegetarians. Eating the earth’s products, such as plants, grains, and fruits that they could gather and eat, would appear to be the natural order of things.
However, necessity breeds invention. Prehistoric men who lived in frozen landscapes or in areas devastated by fire would have eaten anything to survive. Like the soccer players whose plane crashed in the Chilean mountains and were forced to eat the flesh of other players who died in the crash, early man had to make a choice for survival, which could have included eating meat for the first time and forever changing human history – and health.
We can imagine that the first meat eaten by men was charred or cooked as a result of being caught in a natural forest fire. If necessary, they could have eaten raw meat, but we can also imagine that our earliest digestive systems rebelled against eating raw meat.
Imagine eating raw foods and vegetables for eons and then suddenly introducing meat products into your system. You may have heard vegetarian friends tell you about trying to eat meat and becoming violently ill as a result.
Biologists will tell you that humans were not designed to eat meat, but we have adapted to it. However, eating meat is a relatively recent evolutionary development in human history.
