DailyDirt: No Meatless Mondays For Cavemen...

Modern humans have all sorts of wacky diets that are probably slowly killing us in ways we don't fully recognize, but that doesn't mean we should all start eating the way people did thousands or millions of years ago, either. Drinking a "soylent green" all liquid or all processed diet doesn't sound like an optimal solution, but if grown adults want to eat fancy baby food, let them try that experiment (and I'll volunteer to be in the control group). If you want to know more about pre-historic meals, though, check out a few of these links.

• Early human ancestors ate meat which likely improved brain development, and there's evidence of million-year-old butchery on bone fragments with cuts marks. Eating meat, even today, appears to have cognitive benefits for children -- based on a controlled study of hundreds of school-aged kids in Kenya. A healthy diet doesn't necessarily mean more meat is better, but there is evidence that no meat at all correlates with certain problems. [url]
• Using tools to cut raw meat probably allowed our early ancestors to spend less time chewing -- and more time doing other things. Before anyone cooked anything, we needed larger jaw muscles and bigger teeth to eat a real paleo diet. [url]
• If you ever wondered why prehistoric people didn't need to brush their teeth, the answer is that they ate different foods. Early humans ate more meat and not much in the way of grains and sugars, and the bacteria in our ancestors' mouths were more friendly and less harmful than the mouth microbiomes of today. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

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