So what is it with Vegetarians????

I do not have any real issues with vegetarians but I am not sure I understand the reasoning. Is it because we don’t want to kill defenseless animals, is it due to health reasons, is it just as simple as you don’t like it. I don’t know and I can not imagine a set of circumstance that would render me a vegetarian. If for some reason that happens to me I want you to come and kill me, with a horn you get from a dead Texas long horn bull. So let me remind you why eating meat is responsible for our being here in the first place.

First, the earth cooled, whoops let me fast forward a bit. During the Pleistocene age, the planet was going through a cooling cycle. The planet warming and cooling is a cyclical thing that has been going on for about 4.2 billion years – that is a story for another day though. The cooling cycle I am speaking about not happened about a million and a half years ago. At that time at least two of hominans emerged and were wandering the eastern and southern African continent. The two I speak of are Homo Ergaster and Homo Erectus. For those of you who studied a bit know that Homo Erectus were our fore bearers and you have probably never heard of Homo Egastor. Well let me just tell you a bit about why.


Both fashioned crude tools and both lived in the same neck of the woods, that is where the similarities end, in my opinion. Actually in this day and age Homo Egastor is consider a subspecies of Homo erectus. So there is that, he was kinda the red headed step child of the Pleistocene if you will, and of course I would. He also had thinner skull bones and experienced sexual dimorphism as well as having a brain cavity that averaged about 700 and 850cubic centimeters as compared to the 850 to 1100 cubic centimeters for Erectus. A study of their teeth revealed that Egastor was most likely a plant eater while Erectus was a meat eater, probably not a medium well steak eater but being at the top of the food chain afforded him some options.


If we fast forward a bit more to Neanderthal Man, which finally died out about 30,000 to 250,000 years ago, some argue whether he was a descendant of Homo erectus but you can bet he was also a meat eater. While he may seem like a joke in Gieco commercial today he was the “Alfa” species of his day and shared the top of the food chain with very few. He did not get there eating the flora that surrounded him, he was a meat eater. I know some will say he is a separate species from the Erectus before him and the Homo Sapiens that followed, it is not important for this argument, the point is they were meat eaters.


It is believed by some that this change in diet is what allowed our brains to develop which allowed us to becomes better hunters and continue moving towards the apex of the food chain. Once we had firmly established ourselves at the top of the food chain further evolutionary advances were not as dramatic and happened on a slower scale. Still, eating meat is what made us who we are as the human race. Now today we do not have to forage and hunt for our dinners, although some still do we don’t have to. Hell we can get 5,534 different flavors of coffee at the big name coffee houses, we do not need to hunt.


So the question becomes do we need to continue to eat meat to further our evolutionary path? I don’t know the answer to that question but my feeling is that eating meat has brought us pretty far and I for one see no need to stop now. As always, nothing is bad for us if we use moderation

Although I am still betting it has been the lettuce and the water that is killing us, you wait and see.

So are you a vegetarian?

“Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him” - Emerson