Sorry, Ed, but you are very wrong there.

Humans are omnivores and this high prevalence of flesh foods is rather
recent in our ancestry. We lack specializations for meat eating.

The very earliest primates were mostly insectivorous with high cusped
molars with ridges perfect for crunching insects and even tiny thinly
shelled mollusks, then omnivory became more common. Omnivory means,
"Hey, we'll eat that!" Okay, not quite, but close. Omnivory in primates
goes back way before any humans or protohumans, and you'll find that
most primates still will eat anything from wild grains to insects,
to fruits, to young leaves (and some with specializations eat older
leaves), to sap, to carrion, and even for some to pilfered eggs young
animals (or adult animals with Pan troglodytes, the "common" chimp). To
this day we humans have incisorform canine teeth (slicing and scooping
function for that shape -- fruit, vegetable, and leaf eating. Mostly
primates are no meat eaters, though.

We also have specialized grinding molars. Heck, we have the entire
"T Complex" which was named after Theropithecus which eats a lot of
grains. The T Complex includes features like grinding molars that
are needed to get the best nutrition from grains, frontal sexual
attractants (just notice how much more the mammaries of human women
show up than in other primates), and nicely padded rear ends for a lot
of sitting which is badly needed when you are laboriously pulling off
a lot of small seed grains to eat. We have a long history of grain
eating. It isn't as long as the fruits (frugivory), vegetable, or
insect eating (which we are not specialized for but insect eating
happens in the majority of Earth's human cultures to some extent).

Flesh eating came later and to this day in gatherer-hunter societies
the meat component is only about 25% of the Calories in the diet. There
are some reasons to think that it may have been lower pre- cooking.
Cooking partly digests the meat letting more nutrients be easily taken
up from it.

Eating large amounts of flesh came much later and is mostly a by-
product of complex economic and food systems and relative wealth
compared to earlier generations, and there are a large number of things
that point out that we are not optimally geared to having that be quite
as large a portion of diets as many let it fill, for examples, arterial
plaque, intestinal malignancies (much greater with flesh eating esp.
red meat), not specialized teeth for eating meat (Unlike ferrets we do
not have carnassials), etc. Don't let having canine teeth confuse the
issue because of the name "canine". The canine teeth precede canines
and serve a range of functions depending on their forms.

Now, there were some complex forms of cooking by people, like noodles,
earlier than people had suspected -- known now thanks to some cool
discoveries in the last decade.

Sukie (not a vet)

Recommended ferret health links:
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/ferrethealth/
http://ferrethealth.org/archive/
http://www.afip.org/ferrets/index.html
http://www.miamiferret.org/
http://www.ferretcongress.org/
http://www.trifl.org/index.shtml
http://homepage.mac.com/sukie/sukiesferretlinks.html

[Posted in FML 6293]