Meat consumption research – Part 2 The introduction of agriculture

See Introduction/aim of research for the background to this work

It is not known exactly how agriculture spread after emerging in the middle east around 10-15 thousand years ago and political ideas have skewed some of the theories raised from archaeological findings in the last couple of centuries. The political influence often promoted theories of descent from “civilised” farming ancestors rather than from what were considered “savage” hunter-gatherers. Consequently, the idea of hunter-gatherer incumbents being replaced by a wave of “civilised” farming peoples coming from the middle east was preferred by many in the field and seemed to fit the evidence. However, examination of the current state of research leads Richards (2003) to conclude “the majority of European genetic lineages have their roots in the European Palaeolithic.” This suggests that agriculture was a technique that was taken up by existing peoples rather than being the preserve of a conquering or replacing immigrant farming population.

Meat consumption research – Part 1 Meat and diets in our evolutionary history

San Hunters - Photo by Charles Roffey licensed under Creative Commons license

See Introduction/aim of research for the background to this work

When considering human diets, food requirements and choices it is essential to look at the evolutionary history of our species. This requires looking back at least the couple of hundred thousand years of homo sapiens time on earth and even the previous hundreds of millions of years since our ancestral divergence from other primates. With the relatively recent changes to diet that agriculture and industrialisation have brought, it is especially valuable to consider what has been eaten for most of our evolutionary history.