I have seen vegans try to prove that humans are natural herbivores by citing two autors: Dr Richard Leakey, a paleontologist who claims that humans evolved as herbivores and Dr William C Roberts, a cardiologist who says the same thing as Leakey, but also that humans aren't physiologically built to eat meat and that everyone can go vegan.
This Leakey quote, you mean?
You can’t tear flesh by hand, you can’t tear hide by hand … We wouldn’t have been able to deal with food source that required those large canines.”
Funny thing about that: no one’s been able to find a source on Dr. Leakey actually saying any such thing. It seems to have first appeared in a book by Neal Barnard, who’s with the PCRM (enough said).
Meanwhile: not only is it decidedly strange that Dr. Leakey would think that canine teeth are for chewing with, but here’s something he’d verifiably said three years earlier:
The expansion [of diet] involved making meat an important food source, not just an occasional items, as it was with earlier hominids and is still for baboons and chimpanzees. Although some anthropologists argue that regular meat eating was a late development in human history, I believe they are wrong. I see evidence for the expansion of the basic omnivorous hominid diet in the fossil record, in the archaeological record, and, incidentally, in theoretical biology.
As for Roberts? First of all: one would think that he, being a doctor, would be less credulous when it comes to lay-ideologues; but yet, he came to that conclusion via taking John Robbins at face value.
Secondly? For someone who thinks humans are herbivores and everyone can be vegan, he’s pretty bad at practicing what he preaches: Apparently, he’s not even a vegetarian.
@fucknovegans, @agro-carnist
