Can you give a simple explanation on foods, eaten by mankind, from the very beginning?

Question

How they progressed from ....fruits?.... to vegetables, meat?....to preserved food?

Answer 1

the way I see it, mankind from the beginning at raw foods mostly. From fruits, veggies, nuts, and meat. People today will argue that we *need* carbohydrates and that pasta is actually healthy in small amounts. I disagree because cavemen and early man never ate pasta. From then until about the end of WW2 that's what people ate, with the addition of simple carbohydrates such as sugars in the form of desserts. After WW2, preserved food played an important role with microwaved meals and the invention of the microwave. The rest is history as they say, and now with 'low fat' and 'low cal' diets, people are eating more processed foods than ever before. But, we're still fat. Why? Because they are eating processed foods. If we all went back to eating pure, whole foods like early man, I think we would hardly have the problems we have now with health.

Answer 2

Before we evolved into hominids, our ancestors were insectivorous and pretty small.

Then we we eating fairly fibrous fruits, nuts and veg, with scavenged meat as a side dish, things like snails, left over kills from bigger animals, termites. Gorillas today still eat insects.

Then we started using tools, and began to eat more meat, from Homo Erectus onwards. We became 'stamina' hunters, the method for this is to run animals into exhaustion then kill them. Humans have an unusual ability in the animal kingdom to run VERY long distances because of this.

http://mathildasanthropologyblog.wordpre...

During the homo erectus phase the stone tools allowed tubers and roots to be dug up. It's estimated most of our erectus ancestors calories were from flesh, like hunter gatherers, about 65%.

http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v56/n...

Then you move onto the farming phase. Grains are a pretty late inclusion into the human diet, as the need a lot of processing before you can eat them. This was from about 20,000 years ago onwards, in fits and starts, in various locations. Northern Europe only started eating a large amount of grain from the Roman era onwards.

Dairy was the next foodstuff. In the space of about 8,000 years Europeans have nearly all become tolerant to milk as adults.

We started preserving food by drying, smoking and salting it in the stone ages. With the invention of pottery, we stored grain in pots to make it keep, and to keep rodents out.

It's only recently that we've started to eat large amounts of sugar.

Chas, why is it that humans suffer from all kinds of deficiencies if deprived of animal foods? Why are the children prone to 'failure to thrive,' a term specially coined for vegetarian children not growing properly?

http://www.vegetablekillers.net/forums/e...

http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:4ljVP...

Vegetarian is only healthy with uncommon plant foods sourced from distant locations to supply vital O3 oils rare in plants, and carefully balanced by nutritional scientists. Not an option to your average Homo erectus

Answer 3

People needed to find a way to keep food  fresher longer, especially when traveling, times of droughts...season changes like winter..they use to use salt, which is the main ingredient in alot of perserved food still. Survival in earlier times, meant finding food for your family to eat everyday, so that was a daily chore...If we still had to do this, that is what our life would be all about. The meaning of survival on a day to day basis has a different meaning these days. And for people who lived in places were winters were cold, and snowy, needed a way to keep enough food for the winter...root cellars...packing in salt...We are always finding ways to make our daily lives easier..

Answer 4

Man was created to be vegetarian. Adam and Eve would have eaten fruit and vegetables, and may have started agricultural practices.

After the Fall they were banished from the garden of Eden and had to work for his food: "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food".

People may have started eating meat at this time, though God did not give permission for man to eat meat till after the Flood. This was probably because it was hard for people to get the nutrients they needed in the post-Flood world - no doubt very different to the pre-Flood world, with perhaps important food plants no longer growing.

No doubt our earliest ancestors were quite clever enough to preserve their food from the beginning.