Welcome to Gaia! ::

If she (anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City) is right and eating meat was the major turning point in the evolution of our brains, then that should apply to all animals, not just humans. That means any herbivore species that starts eating meat should progressively get just about as smart as we are. And any species that has been omnivorous as long as humans should already be as smart as we are. Yet there are many animal species that have been omnivorous for as long as humans, maybe even longer, without having the same level or type of intelligence that we do.

Also, a lot of our meat eating (probably most) happened after we made tools. That means that by the time meat became a major part of our diet, we were probably already well on our way to becoming smarter.

When life was about survival rather than comfort and convenience, it was only natural that the smartest people would have a major advantage when it came to living, breeding, and having surviving children. So it's really no surprise that we took a turn down the road to intelligence regardless of our diet.

Her theory also doesn't take into account the fact that our bodies aren't really cut out to eat meat, or at least not as much meat as most people eat. Our teeth, hearts, and digestive tracts have trouble with all this meat. It clogs our arteries and rots in our digestive tract. So our bodies didn't seem to like or fully adapt to our change in diet.

So I don't really buy her theory.

The second half of the article is a different theory. His (a vegetarian anthropologist from Harvard) theory is that cooking food (whether meat or vegetable) is what made the difference because it broke things down, made things easier to chew, and made things easier to digest. And that allowed us to get more nutrients in a shorter amount of time and with less energy being spent on chewing and digesting.

Now that theory seems much more plausible. Because we're the only animals that have this type/level of intelligence and we're the only animals that cook our food. So right off the bat his theory is not contradicted like hers is.

And while I think eating at least some raw foods is important, it probably was also very time consuming back then, especially considering that for a long time a lot of people were eating a lot of meat and potatoes rather than soft and easy to chew fruits.