07-07-2011, 11:33 PM
(07-07-2011, 08:07 PM)Bring4th_Monica Wrote: Apes are primarily vegetarians, except for occasional insects. Their diet consists of mostly fruits and greens. So one can only wonder how and why early humans ever got the idea to eat animals (other than bugs stuck in the leaves).
Quotes below are from http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~stanford/chimphunt.html
Chimpanzees are the most closely-related ape to us:
Quote:Modern people and chimpanzees share an estimated 98.5% of our DNA sequence, making us more closely related to each other than either is to any other animal species. Therefore, understanding chimpanzee hunting behavior and ecology may tell us a great deal about the behavior and ecology of those very earliest hominids.
Chimpanzees eat meat:
Quote:When Jane Goodall first observed wild chimpanzees hunting and eating meat nearly 40 years ago, skeptics suggested that their behavior was aberrant and that the amount of meat eaten was trivial. Today, we know that chimpanzees everywhere eat mainly fruit, but are also predators in their forest ecosystems. In some sites the quantity of meat eaten by a chimpanzee community may approach one ton annually.
Quote:In the early 1960's, when Dr. Jane Goodall began her now famous study of the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park, Tanzania, it was thought that chimpanzees were strictly vegetarian. In fact, when Goodall first reported this behavior, many people were skeptical and claimed that meat was not a natural part of the chimpanzee diet. Today, hunting by chimpanzees at Gombe has been well documented (Teleki 1973; Goodall 1986), and hunting has also been observed at most other sites in Africa where chimpanzees have been studied, including Mahale Mountains National Park (Uehara et al. 1992) (also in Tanzania) and Tai National Park in Ivory Coast in West Africa (Boesch and Boesch 1989). At Gombe, we now know that chimpanzees may kill and eat more than 150 small and medium sized animals such as monkeys, wild pigs and small antelopes each year.
Our hominid ancestors also ate meat:
Quote:One of the most important and intriguing questions in human evolution is when meat became an important part of the diet of our ancestors. Physical anthropologists and archaeologists have been using a number of techniques to try to answer this question. The presence of primitive stone tools in the fossil record tells us that 2.5 million years ago early hominids were using stone implements to cut the flesh off the bones of large animals that they had either hunted or whose carcasses they had scavenged.
Video of chimpanzees hunting a monkey (gruesome): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDFh5JdYh7I