As a vegan who likes to preach veganism — but perhaps that’s redundant —meat-eaters often tell me that “we evolved to be omnivores.” To their surprise, I agree with them. Though I am a vegan, my academic training is in human evolutionary biology, and I cannot let my philosophy hijack the science: Veganism is an unnatural way of life.
Our bodies evolved to kill other animals. Our musculoskeletal anatomy is perfectly tuned to throw objects with lethal speed and precision. We didn’t evolve this strange ability to throw baseballs, but to throw spears — a skill we have utilized to slaughter large mammals since the time of Homo erectus. After we abandoned the forest for the savannah, our lineage developed an expanded waist to let the upper torso twist independently, dropped shoulders to give our chest muscles more leverage, and lowered humeral torsion to allow for more dramatic rotation of the shoulder. These three adaptations made it possible for our species to whip objects through the air at speeds our ape ancestors could not hope to achieve, killing dangerous prey from a safe distance.
Similarly, we have a remarkable capacity to run long distances, a trait that is also absent in our closest cousins (who, by the way, are not…
