
Fat, Not Meat, May Have Led to Bigger Hominin Brains - hourislate
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fat-not-meat-may-have-led-to-bigger-hominin-brains/
======
burtonator
One of the first _human_ foods was actually bone marrow which is basically
pure fat.

This happened about 2MYA by Homo habilis who figured out that you could use
rocks to bust open bones.

Lions and Hyenas would leave huge piles of bones in the middle of the dessert
which had been picked clean by vultures.

One of our ancestors had the brilliant idea to use a rock to bust open the
bones.

Well it's a massive source of free calories. It's absolutely brilliant. It's
just sitting there and there are no other predators or species around to fight
with at that point.

It's also very safe to eat even days after since the marrow is wrapped in
bone.

Next time you're out at a fancy restaurant and they have bone marrow GET IT...

Then realize you're eating one of the first foods that modern man ate and
think of the gift he gave us.

~~~
mancerayder
_Lions and Hyenas would leave huge piles of bones in the middle of the dessert
which had been picked clean by vultures.

One of our ancestors had the brilliant idea to use a rock to bust open the
bones._

Wait - I thought hyenas were specifically bone-busting / eating:

"Spotted hyenas are some of Africa's most proficient predators. A frenzied
scrum of them can dismantle and devour a 400-pound zebra in 25 minutes. An
adult spotted hyena can tear off and swallow 30 or 40 pounds of meat per
feeding. Latecomers to a kill use their massive jaw muscles and molars to
pulverize the bones for minerals and fatty marrow. Hair and hooves get
regurgitated later. "The only thing left is a patch of blood on the ground,"
says Holekamp." [1]

1 - [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/whos-
laughing-...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/whos-laughing-
now-38529396/)

~~~
murukesh_s
May be hyenas also adapter over million year period to bust open bones. But i
wonder why they did not develop a brain like ours!

~~~
Phenomenit
Brains are only developed if there is an advantage and I guess a brain without
fingers, our eyes etc isn't maybe as useful as using the fat for energy.

~~~
onetimemanytime
Yp, brain uses tremendous amount of energy so there's a cost. Use too much of
it to build the brain and you starve...use too little and same result since
you're outsmarted. Rinse repeat until it's perfected.

~~~
bluedino
Heyenas have 2 extra legs to waste energy on. Not much left in the budget for
a big brain.

~~~
code_duck
Rats have a similar brain-to-body mass as humans. Cats are fairly intelligent,
are they not?

------
strainer
I don't subscribe to New Scientist's trick title or the theories of nutrient
limited mammalian brain evolution.

Compare brain size of carnivore species with herbivores - there is no overt
division in average or max brain size. Generally, herbivorous mammals seem to
evolve brains just as large as carnivorous ones. Elephants, orangutans,
gorillas grow big brains on a vegetarian diet.

If predator diets contain a special surplus of evolutionary-brain-growing
nutrients, a few predator species should manifest that claim ~ besides our own
artful and fire cooking one.

~~~
village-idiot
Brain size to body size matters a lot too. Sperm whales have about 6x the
brain we do, but far more than 6x the body to control.

~~~
im3w1l
I know this is the conventional wisdom but it doesn't really make sense.
Controlling a sperm whale's body doesn't seem like a hard computational
problem.

~~~
friedman23
I assume you mean relative to controlling a human body?

~~~
im3w1l
Relative to anything smaller really.

------
mattnewport
> _“We have no examples today of animals that scavenge but don’t hunt,” he
> adds._

I've seen a number of articles in the last few years talking about how
scavenging meat seems to be much more common amongst animals we typically
consider herbivores (like deer) than previously realized. There are also a
number of opportunistic omnivorous scavengers that rely more on scavenging
than hunting it they hunt at all. This claim seems bogus to me.

~~~
jessaustin
Most ungulates eat their own afterbirth. Sure, that's easier to digest than
most carcasses would be, and less likely to spread disease, but it shows that
meat digestion is possible.

~~~
TeMPOraL
If I'm to believe [0], that applies to many if not most mammals, _some humans
included_.

\--

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placental_expulsion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placental_expulsion)

------
koverda
Wouldn't other animals with strong bites be capable of crushing bones to eat
the marrow inside? The theory is big on assumptions, but I guess that's how it
goes when you're trying to figure out what happened millions of years ago.

~~~
code_duck
Some animals like snakes simply swallow prey whole. Dogs and pigs are known
for eating hastily with minimal chewing, and I'd imagine many other predators
are the same. No idea how efficiently their respective digestive systems
extract nutrients from solid mammal chunks.

~~~
lustysocietyorg
> Dogs and pigs are known for eating hastily with minimal chewing,

Because they have no or smaller cheeks. But they have very acid stomachs.

The Comparative Anatomy of Eating

[http://www.vegsource.com/news/2009/11/the-comparative-
anatom...](http://www.vegsource.com/news/2009/11/the-comparative-anatomy-of-
eating.html)

Omnivore or Herbivore?

[https://livinontheveg.com/omnivore-or-
herbivore/](https://livinontheveg.com/omnivore-or-herbivore/)

Milton Mills, MD: Are Humans Designed to Eat Meat?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXj76A9hI-o&t=66](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXj76A9hI-o&t=66)

------
samstave
I thought this was known.

When my first born was a toddler, she would go into the fridge and eat butter.

I expressed concern to my grandmother, a life long nurse who was born in 1920
said to me; “the brain knows that it needs fats to grow, just let her eat
butter. It is what her body is saying she needs”

She is super smart and it wasnt an issue otherwise.

~~~
EnderViaAnsible
The translation of deficiencies into food cravings has always fascinated me.
People with pica, for example, often compulsively eat non-foods that are in
fact related to a deficiency they have. Anemics sometimes crave dirt (which
does contain iron).

But how does it "know"?

~~~
s_y_n_t_a_x
Probably a memory of the taste and the vitamins that follow it.

My wife craves mints when she's low on iron.

~~~
samstave
But do mints provide any iron?

~~~
bjoli
If they are fortified they do, or better up if they are some kind of mint-
flavoured supplements.

------
stevenwoo
Fat from marrow and brains to be clear, other articles make that distinction
in the title, and do not jump to the fat conclusion in the title.

~~~
felipemnoa
And the only reason they went after the marrow and brain was because they were
eating the leftovers, according to the article. They couldn't really eat other
parts of the animal unless they wanted to become food to other predators.

------
shard972
It's still a bit bizarre watching the western world switch form carbs good,
fat bad to carbs bad fat good in the span of like a decade.

~~~
narag
_...to carbs bad fat good in the span of like a decade_

Not at all. I remember it was a thing in the seventies. The low-carbs diet has
been viciously attacked for many decades, so it comes and goes every few
years. I first heard of it when Atkins popularized it:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_diet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_diet)

See how Wikipedia says it's "a fad diet" and its claims "questionable",
implying that it doesn't work at all.

But now take a look at this other article, a couple links further:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketosis)

"In glycolysis, higher levels of insulin promote storage of body fat and block
release of fat from adipose tissues, while in ketosis, fat reserves are
readily released and consumed.[5][7] For this reason, ketosis is sometimes
referred to as the body's "fat burning" mode.[8]"

So it turns out it works?

Is it dangerous? Maybe, but I wouldn't trust the sources that I already know
are lying to my face. Not to talk about my own experience, but that's valid
for me, YMMV.

In HN there were some submissions past year about this guy that did the
research in which Atkins based its diet:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yudkin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yudkin)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+yudkin)

Edit: I forgot to say what I started writing this comment for to begin with,
that many millions did the Atkins diet at the time and vouched for it.

~~~
darkpuma
The notion that low-carb diets are superior has deeply unsettling political
implications, for exactly the same reason that low-meat diets don't: _what are
the staple crops of humanity?_

The top ten in order are: _corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, sassava, soybeans,
sweat potatoes, yams, sorghum, and plantains_. These are all carbs! If we
accept that low carb diets are better for people, then we must either accept
that we are going to feed humanity sub-optimally, or that humanity is _well_
past the healthy carrying capacity of the planet. There is simply no way in
hell we can get 7.5 billion people eating keto, or anything close to it.

Vegan activists are proposing a dietary future that is very much in line with
the current global agro-industrial status quo. However low-carb proponents are
proposing a diet that, if universalized, would necessarily put them in the
camp of people like Pentti Linkola.

~~~
narag
Please, understand that Atkins diet is not a diet recommended for _everybody_.
It's a diet created to help people that suffer an imbalance in their diet (or
worse, in their metabolism) that has made them get fat and they want to lose
weight.

That's why "balanced diet" is an absurd recommendation for fat people. If
you're following a balanced diet, you probably don't need to lose weight.
Atkins himself recommended a balanced diet, just avoiding refined carbs, for
most people.

One personal comment: I wouldn't follow any diet proposed by _activists_ of
any kind, specially when their main motive is their particular ethics that, at
least for me, suggest a strong bias. Unless of course I share that same
ethical vision. Edit: I actually wouldn't follow _any_ life advice from
activists of any kind, I'd rather have my own agenda.

~~~
darkpuma
There are people who recommend obese people adopt diets that induce ketosis.
These people are not suggesting diets that should be followed by everybody.
However there are also people who say that carb intake should be greatly
reduced across the board for everybody, that even something seemingly extreme
like a 90% reduction of carbs in the average diet wouldn't be enough to induce
ketosis but would nevertheless be far healthier.

However the current size of the human population is incompatible with anything
other than the vast majority of people getting the vast majority of their
calories from carbs. For that reason, people recommending a large reduction on
carb intake across the board will almost certainly continue to be
marginalized, pushed to the sidelines in most mainstream discussions.

------
the_fonz
Whale blubber and mammal livers are high in vitamin c and considering primates
lost the function of the GULO (L-gulonolactone oxidase) gene, one could
surmise from megafauna extinctions that hunting was essential to most nomadic
hominids.

Also, GULO is one of many interesting genes to contemplate resurrecting.

------
huffmsa
This is new news? O thought it was established a while ago that humans have
only made the progress we have because of an increase in animal fat
consumption.

Hell, with a few exceptions, you can cluster mammals in a pretty accurate
grouping of intelligence by the percentage of animal fat in their diet.

~~~
vanderZwan
It's an ongoing debate:

> _In a wide-ranging review published in February’s issue of Current
> Anthropology, Thompson joins a team of researchers to weave together several
> strands of recent evidence and propose a new theory about the transition to
> large animal consumption by our ancestors. The prevailing view, supported by
> a confluence of fossil evidence from sites in Ethiopia, is that the
> emergence of flaked tool use and meat consumption led to the cerebral
> expansion that kickstarted human evolution more than 2 million years ago.
> Thompson and her colleagues disagree: Rather than using sharpened stones to
> hunt and scrape meat from animals, they suggest, earlier hominins may have
> first bashed bones to harvest fatty nutrients from marrow and brains._

> _Then, starting in the mid-1980s, an opposing theory arose in which Homo’s
> emergence wasn’t so tightly coupled with the origins of hunting and
> predatory dominance. Rather, early hominins first accessed brain-feeding
> nutrients through scavenging large animal carcasses. The debate has rolled
> on through the decades, with evidence for the scavenging theory gradually
> building._

> _Because large animals such as antelope pack a serious micro-and-macro-
> nutrient punch, scientists have thought their meat contributed to humanity’s
> outsized brains. A consensus arose in the 1950s that our ancestors first
> hunted small animals before moving on to larger beasts around 2.6 million
> years ago. Flaked tool use and meat eating became defining characteristics
> of the Homo genus._

You know, "science advances one funeral at a time" and all that.

Plus, I'm sure there is some kind of power-fantasy attachment to the older
theory that basically puts humans on top of the food chain as apex predators
due to our intelligence.

~~~
huffmsa
> _Plus, I 'm sure there is some kind of power-fantasy attachment to the older
> theory that basically puts humans on top of the food chain as apex predators
> due to our intelligence._

Probably has more weight than it'll ever be given credit for.

"Early man noticed cats and hyenas are bigger, faster, stronger, starts
picking the bones of their kills. Hundreds of generations later, man's need
for more fat and meat exceeds what's available from scavenging. With his
increased brain and brawn, he begins digging pungee pits to kill his own
animals."

Not very glamorous.

~~~
vanderZwan
> _Probably has more weight than it 'll ever be given credit for._

Well, there is one way out: once the previous generation loses power, the next
one can feel smugly superior by saying how petty they were.

------
sabareesh
So everyone get in keto diet and get smart.. When I grew up bone marrow is my
favorite meat but now in US it is hard to find

------
vanderZwan
Tangent: this is a Scientific American "reprint" (reshare?) of a Creative
Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 licensed article originally published here:
[https://www.sapiens.org/evolution/brain-evolution-
fat/](https://www.sapiens.org/evolution/brain-evolution-fat/)

I don't know if that matters to others, but I personally prefer the original
source for articles like these.

------
knowThySelfx
Ghee is considered "Brain food" in Indian culture. It is included in many food
items and also in Ayurvedic Meds.

[https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/amp39Gheeamp39-and-
its-m...](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/amp39Gheeamp39-and-its-many-
benefits/articleshow/10979319.cms)

~~~
msiyer
Poisons in very low quantity are used to treat diseases. Could it be that
Ayurveda uses milk to treat the imbalance of the "doshas"?

As a food, Ghee was used so very sparingly that it was almost not used at all.
We cannot compare the quantities we consume today with those before the Dairy
Revolution.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
The writers of the Rgveda certainly were members of a pastoralist society, so
they would have had a decent amount of dairy, if not quite the same quantities
as today.

------
Mikeb85
It was likely both. Protein offers diminishing returns after you have
'enough', fat offers good amounts of energy and nutrients. Also, humans likely
have always eaten some plant material, but wild plants are quite poor in
calories and macronutrients.

------
chiefalchemist
Makes sense. The brain needs fuel. Without adequate fuel there's no way for it
to grow, unless the body gave up some of its need for the same fuel. So I
would presume there's that as well. That is, the body also evolved to feed the
brain.

~~~
sc4les
Well fat to grow but it burns sugar

~~~
glastra
It _can_ burn _glucose_ (table sugar is _sucrose_ ).

It can also burn other stuff [0] and have almost no requirements for glucose,
all of which can be provided through gluconeogenesis from amino acids and the
glycerol backbone of fat.

[0]:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874681/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2874681/)

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
It prefers to burn glucose. You have to be starving it to get it to use
ketones.

What does that tell you?

~~~
glastra
Your body also prefers to metabolize ethanol (which provides quite a bit of
energy, by the way) before anything else in the bloodstream.

What does that tell you?

Absolutely nothing. I could go with the "get rid of poison" narrative, but
that is a bit too extreme and is usually taken with a great deal of
psychological resistance. I couldn't blame you.

Also, I believe that a well-formulated ketogenic diet is pretty far from
starvation, enabling me to do exactly the same, if not more, as when I was
running on carbohydrate. Of course, you might believe otherwise, but do take
the time to think critically about where this belief stems from.

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3900881/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3900881/)

A keto diet is good for cutting weight while bodybuilding, or doing any
sporting endeavor and you got fat, but prolonged periods on it will damage the
brain.

"Of course you may believe otherwise" and so on

~~~
glastra
I must be missing something. What is the relevant portion of the article you
linked? They even _praise_ the ketogenic diet.

In case you wonder, the brain uses around 25% glucose and 75% ketones even in
deep ketosis. Glucose in the blood is stable, and spent glucose is replenished
through gluconeogenesis on demand.

I would like to know what your point is here. Thanks.

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
It doesn't praise ketogenic diet anywhere. Quote it then. My point is that the
ketogenic diet is useless for anyone but eppilieptics or those wanting to lose
weight fast, bodybuilders or sports that require weight limits

"Within minutes, glucose depletion and associated compromised bioenergetic
pathways cause extensive neuronal death in the core of the infarction, and
over time in the surrounding tissue"

Someone on here is going to read your bad advice, and god forbid, follow it.
Here's my two cents

~~~
glastra
The paper you linked mentions the diet twice, and both mentions are positive:

> Early diagnosis of the GLUT1 deficiency syndrome is important because
> adherence to a ketogenic diet (Glossary) [15] is an effective treatment for
> most patients [83]; in general, ketogenic diet efficiently suppresses
> epileptic seizures in childhood drug-resistant epilepsy [87].

Regarding your quote, please read the sentence right before it:

> A thromboembolic occlusion of a brain-supplying artery leads to an acute
> disruption in blood supply to a specific brain territory, causing cerebral
> ischemia (Figure 1b). Within minutes, glucose depletion and associated
> compromised bioenergetic pathways cause extensive neuronal death in the core
> of the infarction, and over time in the surrounding tissue [90, 91].

The sentence you quoted is in the context of a fucking stroke and has
absolutely nothing to do with diet. Are you aware of that?

And again, the brain still has glucose readily available (and uses it) when on
a ketogenic diet.

Please do try to inform yourself and/or read more carefully before judging
others' views.

------
thornjm
\- The break down of fats for energy is called beta-oxidation and is not
performed by brain cells.

\- The brain relies on the liver to produce ketone bodies instead.

\- Our cells break down carbohydrates, then proteins and then fats

A diet high in fat only contributes raw calories to the brain - the fuel is
unusable directly. The argument basically boils down to: more calories led to
bigger brains.

