Evolution expert takes highest science award
21.09.2004
By SIMON COLLINS
www.nzherald.co.nz
An evolutionary expert who says meat-eating made us human has been awarded New Zealand's top science prize, the Rutherford Medal.
Professor David Penny, a Massey University biologist, raised vegetarian hackles when he wrote in Nature this year that "an increased proportion of meat in the diet of early humans was important for an increase in brain size".
"Apes were mostly vegetarian," he said yesterday. When the early ancestors of humans ventured out of the trees a few hundred thousand years ago and started stalking wild animals, they took in new chemical compounds which enabled brain growth.
"The brain is a very costly organism. It requires a lot to grow it and keep it running," Professor Penny said.
"Since the domestication of peas and beans [a mere 10,000 years ago], we have probably got richer sources of proteins from plants, but of course that's really post-being human.
"Now you can be vegetarian and have all sorts of plants that have high amino-acid levels. But you probably couldn't have been a vegetarian 50,000 years ago."
FULL ARTICLE
No time like the present.
Bookmarks