Rabbit starvation is greatly misunderstood. First off, rabbit starvation is not technically a starvation death, it is a death of malnutrition. You will die of malnutrition eventually if you eat one thing solely, even if that thing is otherwise the healthiest food on the planet.
The study you are referring to was looking at all meat diets in an attempt at recreating the Inuit diet. Inuit do eat mostly meat but from a variety of animals, they also eat a variety of berries, fireweed, grasses, tubers, and stems from tundra plants like vetch. Seasonally, 45% of their calories come from protein compared to about 20% from other cultures. The fat stores provide micronutrients necessary to digest protein, any protein.
It does not follow that because those micronutrients can be found in fat that they cannot be found elsewhere. They can and they are. Bananas, grains, and nuts are all sources of vitamin B6, a nutrient necessary in protein metabolism.
Nor does it follow that you will die if you only consume lean meat, rabbit or otherwise, but also eat from plant and insect sources. There very well may be examples of people who have lived off solely lean meat sources successfully on an otherwise omnivorous diet.
It only means that if all you eat is rabbit, within a week you’re going to get very sick with fatigue and diarrhea and then you’re going to die of protein poisoning because you can’t digest protein without other nutrients as this wikipedia article makes clear. But you don’t starve to death. You die of severe dehydration brought about by diarrhea or too much nitric acid in your blood causing organ failure.
Jess Thomson’s ideas, while interesting to men, ignore a few salient points. One, the cubic volume of hominids did not increase until after prehistoric mega fauna became extinct and they were forced into hunting smaller, more wily game.
Just because a prey is very large does not mean that it is not easy to kill due to slowness or predictability. It’s more believable and likely that mega fauna were chosen as prey species precisely because it was evolutionarily easier to hunt them. Prehistoric peoples would only have had to sneak up behind them, wait for a small group to separate itself from the main herd and then stampede them off a cliff. Enough meat and resources for most of the winter with very little relative risk. Was it dangerous? Sure. But maybe not as dangerous as hunting multiple times against prey more used to avoiding predation and able to fight back while simultaneously not becoming a meal yourself. Again and again and again.
Homo neanderthalensis had the largest brain at 1680cc compared to modern Homo sapiens who clock in at 1400cc. The time frame of largest brain in neanderthals coincides with hunting smaller game. In fact, the brain size in H. sapiens actually decreased after the advent of agriculture, which suggests that hunting is not the greatest pressure point for the evolution of larger brains and that larger brains are not necessarily the more intelligent, adaptable, or desirable brain. After all, we’re still here and they aren’t.
Are you owning being dumber than a neanderthal?
As to your suppositions about testosterone levels being correlated to the evolutionary pressures of hunting …oy vey.
Human males do not have the highest testosterone levels of primate species. Gorillas do, and they have a vegetable and insect diet. So it’s not that.
If you can stomach reading through this article, I warn you, it’s incredibly long and is not light reading, it will break down several evolutionary factors in conjunction to testosterone levels across many species of primates.
Further, testosterone levels are not static, nor should they be. So we should be careful about assuming that testosterone levels lead to behavior X ignoring the possibility that behavior X leads to an increase or decrease in testosterone because we failed to consider tangential effects of higher testosterone levels like pain reduction.
For example, are males aggressive because of testosterone or do males become aggressive to alleviate pain by increasing their testosterone levels.
Any woman will tell you the second one is as much or more likely than the first. After all, the brain uses the same circuitry for dealing with physical and emotional pain. And the male ego is completely adrift, lost in a sea of confusion about your own nature, direction, and purpose.
