Did prehistoric man eat raw meat?

Question

If he did then did he get sick?

If he did then shouldn't we be eating it too?

Answer 1

Yes, before they discovered how to make fire and cook food with it. People back then on average die earlier than us. But hygiene standards weren't the only reason of course.

Answer 2

many of them probably did get sick

this is just like how animals eat raw meat and stay healthy. They eat it before bacteria grows on it, which is what people probably did also

Answer 3

Our earliest ancestors did, and many paleoanthropologists argue that the brain development that led to modern humans was promoted by the transition from a vegetarian diet to an omnivorous one.

We still do eat raw meat: sashimi and sushi, herring, and many other fish products all over the world, beef carpaccio and beef tartare, and so forth. But now we have the choice or raw or cooked.  

Answer 4

Yes they did. Scientists seem to be in agreement that prehistoric humans/hominids are raw meat. The meat was not hunted but mostly scavenged from the kills of predators.

Modern man still eats raw meat.  

Answer 5

Im sure they did. You can eat raw meat if ya want, I prefer to at least warm it up a little bit. A nice medium rare steak is great, still juicy but at least cooked a little.

Answer 6

Well, it's always been possible to make fire, but I don't know how long it took people to figure it out. I'm sure they probably did eat raw meat at some point, and i don't personally feel there's anything wrong with us doing it either.

Answer 7

yes they did, but they didn't get sick because they had enzymes in there stomach that we no longer have that let them eat that.  

Answer 8

Since generations are still here I would think not becaue they would have died. Most likely they ate a vegan diet based on grain and plants since they are full of nutrients and easily accessible.

And saying that makes no since we do (should) things that are logical and beneficial today in current time, sometimes that is doing something centuries ago sometimes it's not. Slavery was not beneficial to us so it was outlawed neither was it logical, same with eating dead animal flesh. Except like I said due with the way our bodies were designed back then it would have been impossible to eat raw flesh becaue we would not be able to chew or rip it, on top of that if we somehow did we would die from digesting raw dead flesh. When they found fire that is when humans started eating dead flesh for some odd reason, but before then it was impossible.

Answer 9

Maybe who knows......

However, you must remember that we have evolved a lot over thousands of years.

You would need teeth like lions to rip and tear the sinews, fat and muscle in raw meat and modern man no longer has the teeth for that.

Having said that, you can get a Blue Steak in some of the more upper class restaurants. A Blue Steak is basically raw in the middle but just sealed on each side. You can only do this with top-of-the-range fillets because standard supermarket meat would be too tough.

So you ask "if he did then shouldn't we be eating it too". I expect that prehistoric man did many things that we don't do today, so do you want us all to regress to a nethandral status again?

Also steroids, pesticides, antibiotics, Mad Cow Disease, pollution etc... that are in modern meat were not around in prehistoric days. The meat back than would have been a lot purer. So I would not risk it these days.

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Answer 10

if the prehistoric people didn't even know about fire, should we take advice from them?

Answer 11

Cave-men were foragers.  They ate meat when they had to but it's certainly easier to kill a carrot than an animal.

Answer 12

Yes they did.

The ice age helped out on that one, because they would have developed early Typhoid symptoms and caused an epidemic if it were not for such extreme cold and hot temperatures.