Many people have asked me, why do you ask where gorillas get their protein, when our bodies and our body chemistry more closely resemble those of chimpanzees? My answer is that gorillas are much bigger and more powerful than chimpanzees. Last night, I saw a museum exhibit that compared a gorilla skull to a chimpanzee skull and a human skull. (They might have been models. It was hard to tell.) The gorilla skull was huge! The chimpanzee skull was about the same size as a human skull.
The other reason is that gorillas eat a much more strictly plant-based diet. Chimpanzees hunt once in a while, and they often eat their kill. Even so, they still eat a lot less meat than just about any human population. Nevertheless, I was afraid that the fact they eat a little bit of meat now and then would muddy the waters.
My point is this. Most of the really big and powerful land animals got big and powerful by eating plants. They don’t worry about getting a protein deficiency on a plant-based diet, and neither should you.
(Image courtesy of Mahlatini Luxury Safari, https://www.mahlatini.com/gorilla-trekking-safaris/)
A huge brain consumes a huge amount of energy. An animal with an overly large brain would be more likely to starve to death unless the larger brain could pay its own way by helping the individual extract more calories from the environment or by helping the individual evade predators more effectively.
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/4/557.abstract
It doesn’t take that much intelligence to eat grass or to run fast. Thus, big grazing animals might not need to waste extra calories on a bigger brain, so it’s silly to insult their intelligence.
Gorillas, by the way, are big herbivores that are smarter than predators. So much for your theory that herbivore equals stupid.
There is no reason to believe that human beings need any nutrients from seafood in order to grow a proper brain. Severe iodine deficiency can cause mental retardation, but iodine can be added to salt for people whose food is grown in iodine-poor soils.
In Jenkins’ experiments where the volunteers ate a gorilla-style diet, they had trouble eating enough food to maintain their weight. However, nobody died of a “clotted” digestive tract from not chewing their food!