{"id":7295,"date":"2016-03-27T12:10:52","date_gmt":"2016-03-27T19:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=7295"},"modified":"2016-03-22T13:02:59","modified_gmt":"2016-03-22T20:02:59","slug":"take-that-salad-eaters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2016\/03\/27\/take-that-salad-eaters\/","title":{"rendered":"Take That, Salad-eaters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/science\/sciencenow\/la-sci-sn-raw-meat-stone-tools-evolution-20160309-story.html\" target=\"_blank\">from The LA Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<h1>How raw meat &#8212; and our ancestors&#8217; inability to chew it &#8212; changed the course of human evolution<\/h1>\n<p><span class=\"trb_ar_by_nm_au\" data-byline-withoutby=\"\">by\u00a0<a class=\"trb_ar_by_nm_au_a\" href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/la-bio-deborah-netburn-staff.html#nt=byline\" target=\"_blank\">Deborah Netburn<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"trb_embed_imageContainer_img\" title=\"Raw meat -- not so easy to chew,study finds\" src=\"http:\/\/www.trbimg.com\/img-56e0b2a2\/turbine\/la-sci-sn-raw-meat-stone-tools-evolution-20160-001\/750\/750x422\" alt=\"Raw meat -- not so easy to chew,study finds\" width=\"480\" \/><em>A new study suggests that neither we nor our ancestors were capable of eating raw meat without some form of processing. (Randy Leffingwell \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Paleoanthropologist\u00a0Daniel Lieberman chewed raw goat meat for the sake of science,\u00a0so\u00a0he knows from experience that it&#8217;s a challenge.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a little salty, and it&#8217;s very tough,&#8221; the Harvard University professor said. &#8220;You put it in your mouth and you chew and you chew and you chew and you chew, and nothing happens.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As Lieberman discovered first hand,\u00a0modern human teeth are not suited to breaking chunks of\u00a0raw meat into pieces that are small enough to swallow.<\/p>\n<p>Effective raw-meat eaters like wolves and lions have teeth that are designed for slicing through elastic muscle, almost like a pair of scissors. Humans, on the other hand, have teeth that act like a mortar and pestle. Our pearly whites are designed for crushing, not slicing. When we chew on raw meat, the meat does not break apart.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It stays like a wad in your mouth,&#8221; Lieberman said. &#8220;It&#8217;s almost like a piece of chewing gum.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Still, the fossil record suggests\u00a0that ancient human ancestors with teeth very similar to our own\u00a0were regularly\u00a0consuming\u00a0meat 2.5 million years ago. That meat was presumably raw because they were eating it roughly 2 million years before cooking food was a common occurrence.<\/p>\n<p>Yet oddly, these meat-eating\u00a0hominims\u00a0had\u00a0smaller teeth compared to their mostly vegetarian predecessors, as well as reduced chewing muscles\u00a0and a weakened bite force, anthropologists say.<\/p>\n<p>[ <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/science\/sciencenow\/la-sci-sn-raw-meat-stone-tools-evolution-20160309-story.html\" target=\"_blank\">click to continue reading at LAT<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The LA Times How raw meat &#8212; and our ancestors&#8217; inability to chew it &#8212; changed the course of human evolution by\u00a0Deborah Netburn A new study suggests that neither we nor our ancestors were capable of eating raw meat without some form of processing. (Randy Leffingwell \/ Los Angeles Times) Paleoanthropologist\u00a0Daniel Lieberman chewed raw [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mirth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7295"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7295\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}