Covid struck Asia 25,000 years ago altering people s DNA, bombshell study claims
Evolutionary geneticists have made a stunning discovery that may explain why Covid-19 infection and death rates have been lower in East Asia than elsewhere in the world
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Mapping the Human Transition from Vegan to Meat Diets
Homo erectus was the first member of our species to dominate the global food chain and become what zoologists call “a hypercarnivore” or “apex predator.” These terms describe mammals with diets where 70 percent of their food was other animals.
Ben-Dor, who is the lead author of the study, wrote in the new paper that the human colon is “77 percent smaller than that of the chimpanzee, while our small intestine is 64 percent longer.” The colon is where energy is extracted from plant fiber and the small intestine is where sugars, proteins and fat are absorbed.
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Apr. 4, 2021 1:30 PM
We are what we eat, goes the old saying, and new research has revealed one of the deepest and oldest secrets of who we are as a species. Humans are natural born killers: super-predators designed by evolution to subsist mainly on the meat and fat of large animals, and genetically hardwired to hunt our prey into extinction, says a new study on the eating habits of prehistoric hominins going back 2 million years.
This meta-analysis collated information from some 400 previous studies, conducted over decades by unconnected scientists, and providing biological, genetic, archaeological and molecular data on the diet of our Stone Age ancestors.
Introduction
In trying to understand how aggression works, as well as aggressive emotions like anger, I decided to go to the animal literature. Human psychology research is all too prone to being determined by researchers’ preconceptions, and we all have a lot of firsthand experience and personal agendas when it comes to theorizing about human behavior. It’s easier to get some distance when thinking about animals; we have less stake in any particular theory of how animal emotions work. It’s also easier to set up experimental conditions with animals that would be hard to do ethically with humans, like keeping them in confinement and exposing them to stressors.