SHORT GUT - BIG-BRAIN - LONG LIFE

OUR PROGENITORS HAD LONG-GUTS
WE HAVE SHORT-GUTS & BIG-BRAINS.

I've been reading an excellent New Scientist short book on the origins of Homo Sapiens - and a History of the World by TV presenter Andrew Marr. Both tracts mention a possible trigger-event that stimulated humanity's over-sized brains - namely cooking our food. 

Our primate cousins, such as chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos and D J Trump have far longer digestive tracts than do Sapiens, which they need to digest leaves, fruit, grains and uncooked meat and fish. Our cooking part or pre-digests our diet - releasing and making available more energy, about ten times more energy, than raw food. So, with the power of cooking for hundreds of thousands of years, we have evolved a far shorter gut. 

Science speculates that the hard-work and energy expenditure our ancestors put into natural digestion (internal cooking) was redirected from sustaining long, wide, slow guts full of vegetation, into growing the largest brain, relative to weight and size, on Earth. The immense brain, requiring a large skull, coupled with our determination to stand upright and walk-tall, altering our pelvis, brought huge difficulties to the natural-birth process - hence all the female screaming and yelling in labor-wards - driving the sensitive Sapiens' males away to the nearest bars until the infant's big-head is safely delivered. We need to be redesigned - for the 21st Century. 

Another fundamental re-design that occurs to me is that given we were once gorilla like, with large gaseous stomachs containing long belching guts, capable of fermenting leaves, green-bananas, nuts, grasses, dead squirrels and even tree-bark - over many hours; before discovering fire, cooking and our inner beauty and the slim waists of short-gut primates is - can our guts be even shorter? Do we need to take hours or days to digest our meals? If cooked foods halved the length of our guts - and yet still take hours or days to extract the good stuff and expel the waste - should we extract the good stuff in factories and get rid of the troublesome primate guts altogether? 

98% IS EXPELLED.  2% GIVES US ENERGY

We only retain and absorb a tiny fraction of what we consume - then we convert that fraction to energy, to power our athletics and genius. Why bother with the rest of it? I can put numbers to it. The average human weighs about 12 stone, 168 pounds, and consumes about 50 US tons or 100,000 pounds in 70 years. After converting a little (cooked) food to electricity and necessary cell repairs and renewals, the difference is waste. Thousands of tons of processed waste.

We take in and expel 600 times our body weight. As we age, the mechanisms of consumption and expulsion become vexatious and problematical - for many. Our weighty guts use a huge amount of energy to cart around. Think of the fuel needed to lift you 5 miles high, to fly to see your mother-in-law in Miami. Think of the medications and hospital bills used to deal with our wholly unnecessary part gorilla-part sapiens guts. If cooking once halved our guts and doubled our brains - what would factory assisted digestion do? The proteins and vitamins we need could be cut back to a few ounces a month. Our guts would evolve - probably to a 50th of their present size. We would absorb almost pure energy. The energy and time saved from NOT needing to shovel tons in and out of our systems would be - I am even feeling prophetic enough to say WILL be - reapplied by evolution to give us even larger brains. Do we here have a vision of the egg-headed slender small bodied aliens in Spielberg's, Close Encounters of The Third Kind? With, of course a little re-plumbing of the birth process. 

And... the extra power needed for our pre-digesting pill factories will be available from the transport energy saved. 7.2 billion humans, weighing half as much as today - saves at least half of today's transport costs. 

Short-gut mammals live longer than long-gut mammals. Females live longer than males. Mature people who eat less, live longer. What is not to like? 

EVOLUTION