Pope Francis calls for an end of violence in Syria, Yemen and Libya in his Easter Sunday address and condemns as “scandalous” the continued armed conflicts around the world.
“May Christ our peace finally bring an end to the clash of arms in beloved and war-torn Syria, where millions of people are presently living in inhumane conditions; in Yemen, whose situation has met with a deafening and scandalous silence; and in Libya, where at last there is hope,” the pope says at St. Peter’s Basilica.
Pope Francis delivers the Angelus noon prayer in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, February 28, 2021. (Gregorio Borgia/AP)
Human brain development and eating habits (Dr. Miki Ben-Dor)
Israeli researchers studying the nutrition of Stone Age humans say the species spent some 2 million years as hyper-carnivorous “apex predators” that ate mostly the meat of large animals.
The study at Tel Aviv University, in collaboration with Portugal’s University of Minho, challenges views that prehistoric humans were omnivores and that their eating habits can be compared to those of modern humans, TAU said in a statement.
“Our study addresses a very great current controversy – both scientific and non-scientific,” said Prof. Ran Barkai of TAU’s archeology department, one of the researchers. “We propose a picture that is unprecedented in its inclusiveness and breadth, which clearly shows that humans were initially apex predators, who specialized in hunting large animals.”
Israeli study: Humans were hyper-carnivorous apex predators for 2 million years timesofisrael.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from timesofisrael.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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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.
“There is evidence that large fauna was abundant when early humans evolved, anthropologist Miki Ben-Dor, who recently published a study in
Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, told SYFY WIRE. At some stage very large species were replaced by smaller (though still large) species with a decline in the richness of species. I believe that humans preference for large prey was responsible for their demise.”
There are other primates which are technically omnivores but spend most of their days hanging from trees and feeding. For humans, that was too much effort for too little energy, so they hunted. Ben-Dor and Barkai argue that brain size actually began to decline near the end of the Pleistocene as people started eating more plants and let some of the meat they had previously been after run away from their spears. They also believe that human brain size was at its height when when our own many-times-great-grandparents and other Homo species were consuming things that had more fu