Fruits of the Past

Sixty million years ago the lower primates first developed, the mammals from which we all sprang. So much of what makes us skilled as mammals was developed at this time. The change from clawed paw to a hand that grips was invaluable for picking objects up and for using sticks and stones as tools. Our vision became stereoscopic as the eyes moved from the side of the face to the front. These overlapping visual fields produced the ability to see in depth - vital to identify predators from a distance.

A species, in order to survive and rise in dominance, must be flexible, must adapt to changing conditions and take advantage of the unexpected. All living creatures that depend upon a particular environment for their survival are doomed to extinction if that environment is destroyed. The key to success is not only flexibility but also inconsistency, the art of confusing your predators. Lemurs, one of our earliest primate ancestors, stayed in the trees for most of their time and their diet was limited to leaves, nuts, fruits, berries and edible stems. Their habitat has remained more or less similar for 60 million years.

Twenty million years after the lemurs came the Anthropoids, the higher primates that include monkeys, apes and humans - another group of vegetarians. Between five and 25 million years ago this group was diversifying and colonising Africa, Eurasia and the tropical Americas using the land bridges that existed at that time. They would have moved great distances, from cool to warm, from cold to hot and it is thought that the cooler northern climes helped to develop the anthropoids and led them to eat more bark, the cambium beneath the bark (which is high in protein and carbohydrates) and the leaves of evergreens. They were all vegetarians but the diet was widening with many more food choices - and a richer diversity of nutrition means greater intelligence.

Around 18 million years ago came the hominoids. apes which lack tails and have larger brains and bodies than the monkeys. They evolved in Africa and included one called Proconsul. sometimes referred to as the 'Daddy of us all'. It is thought that we share this ancestor with the gorilla and it, of course, is another famous vegetarian. DNA studies show that we have a close relationship with the gorilla and the chimpanzee and that we split from one common ancestor around five to six million years ago.

Because we have the fossilised jaws to study, we know that these primates were herbivores and ate fruits, nuts, berries and the cambium which grows in the spring beneath the bark as the tree begins to swell. Some of us still eat it today and we call it slippery elm, a food for invalids.

A quick dash to the ground might have resulted in seeds, stems, bulbs and roots, even lichen from damp stones and algae from ponds. This green scum is vital as a component in the building of the nervous system.

Some of our critics have gleefully leapt upon the fact that our primate ancestors were not complete herbivores but ate insects and even hunted and killed baby mammals or tiny monkeys, claims made through observation of primates in the wild today.

Yes, they did eat insects and they might even have chosen the fruits which had insects in them because of their sweet taste but not in sufficient quantity to provoke a change in their dentition. Their canine teeth are small and their molars have a large grinding surface with a thick enamel covering, making their jaws a powerful crushing, grinding and chewing machine designed to cope with vegetation. Their liking for insects did not lead to them trying out other small creatures such as frogs and lizards.

As to the hunting of the small colobus monkey or baby bush pigs, which was seen in a David Attenborough film, this research started with Jane Goodall. Her group of chimpanzees was observed over a period of years so the amount of meat eaten and the number of animals killed could be exactly recorded. Over a span of 10 years, the 50 or so chimpanzees killed and ate 95 mammals. They were all tiny - the young of bushpigs, bushbuck and baboons and most weighed 10lbs or less. It works outl at 2.4 grams per individual per day, about the size of a pea. Their tiny victims were stumbled over by accident and there was no concerted plan to hunt and kill.

Of all the living primates humans are the only one to eat large animals, the rest being almost entirely herbivorous. We sprang out of this genetic breeding pool of largely peaceful groups of amiable creatures that lived by eating grasses, leaves, nuts, berries, fruits and roots. There can be no doubt that our metabolism, built up through these millions of years, is best sustained by a vegan and then a vegetarian diet, in that order.

Three-and-a-half million years ago, Australopithecus Afarensis, nicknamed Lucy, appeared. She was tiny, strode over the African veldt and through the forest, lived near water and was also a herbivore. There were many different types of Australopithecines and one was called Robustos. He has been labelled a war-like killer and the source of our aggression. It is nonsense! He was in fact also a vegetarian but he used the bones of large mammals as tools to dig up roots and bulbs. It was the discovery of these bones alongside his own that made anthropologists think they had found the first hunter. They were at least a million years out.

So when did meat eating begin? We can roughly date hunting because of the tools needed to kill but before that there were some very basic tools used to cut, scrape and dig. These were found with the remains of Homo Habilis, who lived between one-and-a-half and two million years ago. Anthropologists think it is likely that Homo Habilis first scavenged his/her meat from the kill of big cats but like so much of what is said on the evolution of humans, this is just speculation.

Hunting started around one-and-a-half million years ago with the advent of Homo Erectus, who lived until 200,000 years ago. Carnivore anthropologists tell us this as if Homo Erectus, from then on, just ate raw meat and nothing else. There was even a suggestion that our brain development did not begin until red meat entered our diet. If there was a correlation between the consumption of red meat and the enlargement of brain cells, big cats would have the largest brains and be the dominant species in the world today? There are other reasons for increased brain size.

Killing wild animals is far from easy and if early humans had relied on meat alone they would have gone without most of the time. The bulk of the diet was what it always had been, gathered from wild plants and some of it no doubt dried and stored. It is from these years that men and women must have gathered a huge encyclopaedia of knowledge. It was the women and children who searched for and gathered herbs, flowers and seeds, recognising their effect on the human body. Their immense knowledge would have been passed on from generation to generation.

Today, the Amerindian tribes of the Amazon and Orinoco basins have an intimate knowledge of the plants of the rain forest and botanists learn a great deal from them. This storing of a vast amount of information early on in our prehistory must have required greater and greater intelligence.

For the growth of brain cells, a one-to-one balance of two groups of neural fatty acids is needed - Omega 3 and Omega 6. It is this balanced combination which promotes the growth of the cerebral cortex, that frontal lobe which is the site of intellect and reasoning. Omega 6 fatty acids are found in bushes, trees and grasses and in Africa today there are over 200 wild plants bearing seeds and nuts which are rich in them. Omega 3 is found in leaves and other green parts of plants as well as in phyto-plankton and algae.

It is only fair to point out that meat also contains Omega 6 fatty acids but brain cells cannot be stimulated without an equal amount of Omega 3, which is why carnivores cannot become of superior intelligence by eating large quantities of meat alone.

Fair too, to point out that Omega 3 is found in abundance in fish and all sea creatures and sea plants. The richest source of nutrients for early hominids and humans would have been on the interface of land and water and in river estuaries. Brain development could have occurred without the consumption of either meat or fish but simply by eating a wide range of green foods. On the coast this would have inevitably included seaweeds.

So, meat eating began only in the last one-and-a-half million years. Contrasted with the life of an 80-year-old human being it means that only in the last 15 years would meat have been eaten. For 65 years we were vegetarian. I believe this has great significance for our health today. Research already shows us that a herbivore diet is by far the healthiest and it may well be that a raw vegetable and fruit diet, chosen from produce in season, is the optimum healthy diet, as it is so similar to the diet of our evolution. I am not denying that human beings became omnivorous, in fact they colonised the world because they could adapt to the available food sources, but the truth is that very little meat was eaten compared to today's consumption. Hunting was given a great boost when climactic changes destroyed the food sources in the northern climes in the great Ice Ages. But in evolutionary terms this is a very short period and the evidence is that our bodies have not fully adapted to the change. Hunting also helped to change our relationship with animals but the biggest change in that relationship occurred with the move from hunter gatherer to livestock farmer, from nomadic tribes to settlement and domestication. An even bigger change took place with the introduction of factory farming.

American Indians believe that all things contain a spirit, the wind, the trees, the rain, the snow, birds and animals so that when they went hunting (and the majority of tribes were not hunters but farmers) they only took what they felt was expendable and would not risk endangering the survival of any species. They also prayed for the spirit of whatever creature they killed. There was a respect for its essence, an attitude sadly totally lacking in modern humans. I would suggest then that early humans were very like this, closer than we are to the animals they were hunting, closer to the mysteries of life, death and rebirth in the natural world.

The hunter was up against the wild and untamed while the farmer has already partly tamed the animal in his care. The farmer owns the creature, controls its life and death - he dominates it and here is where speciesism begins. Only when domestication began did Homo Sapiens begin to believe that they were the dominating mammal, free to exploit every other living creature.

For the greater part of our recorded history, however, meat was the prerogative of the gods and the powerful and the majority of people ate it only on the few religious festival days throughout the year - they might have been as little as three or four. But as far back as 3,500 BC we know that some people scorned meat altogether and the great thinker and mathematician, Pythagoras, was one of them. The majority of people might well revere such a sage but scorn and vilify his followers. Nothing changes! So why has abstention from meat been ridiculed throughout history?

From the very beginning meat meant power. Wealth was measured in head of cattle. Heroism was measured in how much meat you could consume - strong men were reputed to eat an ox at one sitting.

Wealth meant power and influence in the community, it meant you lead and controlled that community. The poor ate meat twice a year, maybe at Easter and at Christmas. The more meat you ate the more you showed everyone else how well you were doing - it was and still is the gustatory equivalent of the mink coat.

To those who believe in this measure of status, it is singularly annoying to notice that for a small group of people this symbol is dismissed, entirely rejected, even despised. No wonder vegetarians are resented for they refuse to believe in the majority tenet, the status quo faith. But we are not only resented, we are heartily disliked because vegetarians make meat-eaters feel guilty and everyone hates feeling guilty.