You are right about the risk of heavy metal contamination so wont comment on that. But if we are speaking about an animal that crapped on top of the clay pile then that should not be an issue. Soil in general but especially clay has an absolutely enormous surface area that adsorbs both bacteria and viruses. That’s why ground water is usually safe to drink but surface water is not. A large amount of faeces leaking into the soil water from above would potentially contaminate the water with nitrate which could be a slight cancer risk if consumed in large quantities but there should be no risk of getting infected if you are digging deep unexposed clay, even if an animal crapped on top of the pile. As long as there is no heavy metal contamination eating deep clay is probably safer than eating a wild picked berry.

All the ones you listed are either:

Not native to soil but may be on soil if faeces got on there Or Not dangerous in soil but will become dangerous if food gets into contact with it before fermenting Or Only dangerous getting into your blood, but not your mouth.

As long as there is no literal poop on the soil you can eat it raw. These people mentioned in the article were digging deep clay which would carry absolutely no risk of faeces contamination.

After cooking with high heat there should be no germs left. As stated in the article there are no health risks involved except if you eat such a large amount it blocks your intestines. Also even if you didn’t cook it the germs that live in soil are not the same germs that make you sick, those you get from your fellow humans.

I don’t get how you can be against manure in any way. Used correctly there is close to no risk of any diseases getting to the end consumer. Usually you would apply manure before planting and by the time you harvest the crop too much time would have passed for any manure bacteria to survive.

Manure brings lots of benefits. We all know it brings nutrients but it also adds a lot of organic matter and very manure heavy plant cycles can even net store carbon in the soil. And if you wouldn’t use the manure where would you put it? We should all know those US style manure lagoons (poop lakes) are all environmental catastrophes. There is literally no better way to use manure than to spread it on crops. The crops take up the nutrients which saves the nutrients from running into water causing algal blooms. In my European country there is a legal requirement that all manure has to be spread on agricultural land because of the environmental benefits of doing so.

And the “poison”. Well that depends on where you live. There are safe pesticides and then there are generally horrifying ones. I don’t trust the US on this but I at least trust the experts on my country’s chemical regulation authority. They have banned lots of agricultural chem and have very strict requirements for new approvals. The main risk with modern agricultural chemicals are the people applying them, not the people eating the produce. Take glyphosphate for example, the most well researched agricultural chemical in existence. All the horror stories about it read as (and this is a real story I read in the newspaper): “I was spraying glyphosphate in my garden while 8 months pregnant and then I accidentally poured the entire 5 liter container on myself, then I had a miscarriage”. Lots of chemicals are like this. If I pour 5 liters of bleach all over myself I would get sick as well but that doesn’t mean bleached clothes are dangerous.

Both cows, horses and even to a limited extent humans can digest fiber. Cows digest fiber in the rumen where it actually turns mostly into organic acids which the cow can oxidize while the anaerobic rumen bacteria cannot. Interestingly the same thing happens in the large intestine in other mammals. For humans the large intestine is quite small and food moves through there too quickly for much fiber to be properly digested. However the easiest digestible fiber, soluble fiber, actually mostly breaks down even in a human’s large intestine and yields us approximately 2 calories per gram of soluble fiber. For insoluble fiber this amount is extremely low since there is not enough fermentation taking place for it to be completely broken down. However for mammals with a much larger large intestine where food passes much slower, even the harder to digest fibers can be utilized to a large degree.

Horses belong to this category and are called hindgut fermenters. Other examples may surprise you like gorillas and orangutans who have incredibly huge large intestines. That’s why those apes can eat leaves all day and is an explanation why their stomachs are huge without them being filled with fat, it’s all intestines.

However a weakness with hindgut fermentation is that the large intestine can only extract solubles from the microbial mass which leaves out a lot of nutrients. A cow can extract those same organic acids from the fermentation but since the rumen is first in their digestive system the whole microbial mass enters their “ordinary” digestive system which means that they can digest the actual bacteria as well, meaning they manage to extract a bunch of extra microbial proteins that hindgut fermenters may miss. The benefit to hindgut fermentation is however that the first shot at digesting the food is given to the animal itself. A horse can digest starch just as well as a human could but a cow suffers considerable losses in starch digestion since the bacteria gets first gibs, turning the starch to organic acids instead of getting broken down into simple sugars directly, which is more efficient. So in short a cow and horse can both digest fiber. However their digestive systems have significant tradeoffs and one is not necessarily better than the other.

Considering that’s a Holstein breed cow and therefore a milking cow, the nutritional demands are entirely different. Getting a cow to produce 40 liters of milk a day is no easy task and requires grass of the highest quality, combined with a generous dose of concentrate feed with grains and legumes/presscake. If a normal hobby horse was fed a diet like this they would turn obese almost instantly. In fact hobby horses usually require as poor quality feed as possible because it turns out that being ridden at walking speed for an hour 1-2 times a week is a very low amount of exercise for a horse. You have to intentionally grow as rough and low quality grass as possible for the horses not to get obese. That’s why oats are no longer given to horses. A race horse or a working horse that’s active for several hours a day can however be given oats or other concentrated feed and may be able to handle, or at least come close to handling, a dairy cow type diet. However these types of hard working horses are rare nowadays.

TLDR dairy cows and horses generally do NOT eat the same diet.

In the US the native herbivore with the “cow-niche” is the American bison. If we would restore ecosystems and replace captive grazers with wild grazers, increasing the wild bison population is the answer and much preferable to having wild cows (who don’t even exist in the first place, the wild version is extinct as mentioned). Of course bison is not an answer to what to do with the cows that already exist in the US of course.

However if a decision was made to ban all animal agriculture I would be a strong opponent of not rewilding any cows. They are not native and they are not even fit for living in the wild anymore. Just take a Holstein milking cow for example. What use does producing 40liter of milk per day have in the wild? None! Calves can’t drink even close to that amount. The lactating moms would get mastitis. They are not even fit to only make milk for just their calves anymore. Let the domestic cows die out in that case.

Well no shit. That applies to most animals we humans care for, even the ones who we don’t typically eat. Try throwing a hairless cat or a pug out into the wild. They can’t manage without us no more.

Interestingly enough you don’t have to be so specific as Black Angus. All cows are totally extinct in the wild. They derive from the Eurasian auroch which went extinct in most places of its original range over 3000 years ago. The absolute last one died in 1627 in Poland, but even that one was probably not pure auroch. If everyone went vegan we would probably still keep a few cows around in zoos but we would have no where near the amount we have today. If we wanted to reintroduce something similar we would have to rely on reintroducing european buffalos, which are another species but still native to Europe.

I’m neither of those three and I’m mostly interested in the neolithic so unfortunately I don’t have a take on the second human migration out of Africa. Sorry

Nah I’m just very interested in agricultural history (I work in agriculture ) and I learned this stuff as a byproduct of learning about the origins and spread of farming into Europe. If you are interested there are lots of good long-form history videos about the neolithic on YouTube, just search Neolithic. So far Neolithic youtube has not suffered the same AI slop-ageddon as medieval YouTube has.

There was a time where both modern humans and Neanderthals lived together in Europe and it’s likely they mixed. But this was before the last ice age. After the ice age the Neanderthals were already extinct globally and the first people to repopulate Europe were these WHGs who genetically had little to do with the pre ice age population. Therefore I would assume strictly European Neanderthals have little to no modern genetic impact in Europeans. The Neanderthals genes Europeans carry today would instead derive from middle eastern Neanderthals.

Modern native European genetics can be roughly said to derive from 3 main sources. One is western Hunter gatherer (WHG). These were not the first people in Europe but were the first to populate Europe after the latest ice age ended. By analysing their genome we think they were dark skinned, black haired and had blue eyes. The light skin adaptation didn’t actually develop in Europe but in the middle east. Here is where the second group comes from.

Early European Farmer (EEF) originally came from Anatolia and were the ones spreading farming around Europe. Interestingly the spread of farming was not spread by knowledge transfer but by the migration and expansion of EEFs. The EEFs and the WHGs would coexist for hundreds of years with little admixture, living completely different lifestyles. The early European farmers, whose genetics derive from Neolithic Anatolia, were light skinned, brown eyed and relatively short. Modern groups with the most genetic similarity to EEFs are modern day Sicilians so you can imagine that. Overtime the EEFs and the WHGs would eventually mix however.

The third group are the yamnaya, also called steppe Ancestry. The yamnaya were a people group in modern day Romania and Ukraine who just so happened to invent the concept of riding a horse and after they did so they steamrolled about all of Europe in aggressive conquest. The Indo European languages derived from them and their expansion vastly changed the genetics of the continent. And all Europeans derive at least part of their genetics from them, of course in different amounts depending on the region. They were believed to be quite tall and have blond hair and are the “Aryans” that the Nazis talked about.

All modern Europeans are a mixture of these 3 groups, in different proportions. So returning to the pictures in the OP it makes sense for the cheddar man would be dark skinned as he would be 100% WHG as he lives way before any of these groups moved in. This does not mean however that the guy on the right is not a direct ancestor, he very well may be. But since he is also a result of the later migrants, the EEFs and the Indo European expansion, he will of course look vastly different.

I did not know the history of the term tragedy of the commons. Thanks for educating me on that, I will now reconsider using that specific term in the future. However overgrazing is a real issue historically and still today. Overgrazing in the modern Sahel is a great contributor to the advancing of the sahara for example.

Are those generations really worse than those before it? Yes the environmental destruction is unparalleled but so were also the tools that enable that. In the Stone Age people could not have even come close to doing what we are doing right now to the environment even if they wanted too.

The term the tragedy of the commons originally referred to English cattle herders letting their cows overgraze public land because if they don’t overgraze it some other herders would do it instead. Stories like this are everywhere in history. The Vikings cut down every single tree in Iceland and the Faroe islands when they arrived with no care for the environmental whatsoever.

Whaling, the clubbing of seals, the extinction of the dodo. There are countless examples. And if we are talking pure human to human cruelty, no war in the 20th century comes close to what the mongols did.

The people of the 20th century were not more cruel or selfish than previous ones. They were simply the first ones given the tools and ability to pollute the whole earth.

My goto is explaining how a plant can in certain situations be a weed and sometimes don’t. For example in a farm which farms clover seeds the grass is the weed! In a farm which farms grass seeds the clover is a weed! Same in agriculture, stray plants from the previous years crop often appear as a weed in the current years field.

The original point is that billionaires, as I interpret it, is that billionaires are worse than animals. Or at least that if we look at billionaires as if they were animals we would still diagnose them as ill. My point is that that’s not true. Animals can be just as psychotic. Most have absolutely no morals and a subset of them regularly do things that are way worse than what the billionaires are doing, hence my examples.

However animals are not humans. Billionaires are humans. If we say billionaires are like animals that’s already a really bad grade. We humans are supposed to be much better than that. I’m not defending billionaires at all. I’m saying one should compare them to something else. There are much better and more effective ways to criticize them than this.

They don’t do that because they physically can’t. If they could they would. If you have two starving bears and throw them one carcass. Only one will eat because they will fight and scream away the weaker one.

Hey I’m no big supporter of billionaires but “that behavior in any other species we would classify it as some kind of divergent behavior” is extremely wrong. Altruism is extremely rare outside humans. Most animals would absolutely love to get every single piece of food in the forest all to themselves. They steal food from each other constantly. Whole species are based on the very concept of stealing as their main or sole life strategy. There are fish out there whose main food is the juveniles of the exact same fish species. Literal baby-eating as their main strategy.

We humans are supposed to be better than animals. Comparing someone to an animal is comparing them to something bad.

It absolutely states that being gay is a grave sin and even calls for death for them in the old testament. However the message of Jesus in the new testament is one of radical forgiveness and non-judgement. Jesus is not afraid of those who commit sexual sins as seen by one of his companions being a prostitute. Jesus says to love everyone, forgive everyone and only hate the sin itself, but not the sinner. Judging a person is also considered a grave sin, something many modern christians have forgotten.

Therefore there is absolutely a theological basis for allowing homosexuals to attend church, following Jesus example of himself hanging out with prostitutes, another kind of sexual sinner. And since Jesus tells you to love everyone and judge no one there is no reason to hate or shun a gay person. This also applies to other sins. If you rob a bank you can still go to church as well, with the same argument.

However if you talk to a priest or pastor of a liberal LGBTQ affirming church and ask them if gays are allowed in the church they will shout a resounding yes. But if you press them on the question of if homosexual intercourse is a sin or not they will probably get uncomfortable and may give another answer. It’s a very hard biblical reality to deny.

However since you could in theory be gay and have a same sex partner and just simply not have sex with them you could give gay couples the benefit of the doubt. This is the basis for allowing gay marriage. However gay marriage stands on much more shakier grounds than simply allowing LGBTQs in the church, since marriage in the bible is explicitly stated as being between a man and a woman. Some prists/pastors however take a different route to justifying it and that involves reasoning that since God created all humans and some humans are gay, those people most have been created gay by god himself, and everything that God creates is good, therefore gays are good. This argument requires some reasoning outside the Bible but is used by many. Conservatives can attack such a stance saying it directly goes against direct bible quotes while also claiming one is not born gay but you turn gay by your own decision or others influence. Gayness would in this view be a free will sin rather than a god creates attribute.

I’m writing this comment as a non Christian who supports LGBTQ btw. Just trying to explain what I know about the discussion.

I don’t know the reasoning of that fox news analyst. But it is true that the declining birth rates are to a large extent due to less teens and early 20s women having kids. The amount of late 30s and 40s women having kids has actually increased in the same period. Kinda ironic how the young single moms conservative media have been shaming and demonizing for decades were actually the ones keeping the birth rate up. And now that they are far fewer suddenly that’s a problem as well.