The Ancestor Within

I read an article recently about how cats can't taste sweetness. In hindsight, this really isn't very surprising. Cats are meat eaters, they never eat anything sweet, so what evolutionary pressure would they have to push them to evolve an ability to taste sweetness. I'll bet lots of animals can't taste sweetness, insect eating birds for example. I'll bet an insect has a special savory taste to a bird, just as jelly doughnut has for us. Has anyone compared fruit and instect eating bats to see if there is any difference in their ability to taste different flavors?

All of which kind of begs the question of why do we taste sweetness. I've always felt that fruit has some kind of special appeal that no other natural food does, and I don't think I'm alone in this. My theory is that our ancestors, millions of years ago, were fruit eating monkeys. I think we evolved our love of sweetness during this time, and even though it's been several million years, and our stomachs could probably no longer handle a diet of just fruit, we still retain the love of the fruit taste. I think all of our desserts are just an attempt to satisfy the sweet tooth we evolved back then.

On a broader scope, I think it's possible to look within ourselves, look at our most basic likes/dislikes and behaviors, and get a glimpse of what our ancestors were like. I did something like that in an earlier post where I tried to figure out what kind of mating patterns our ancestors may have had. I've also used this same way of thinking to try to figure out what kind of communication we might have had before we developed language. For example, throughout the entire world, people laugh, smile and cry the same. As far as I know, the other apes don't do any of these things the way we do, so this is something that we must have evolved after splitting off from the other apes.

What else? An angry "Grrr", is that universal? What about the moans people make when making love, or the heavy sigh when suddenly faced with a lot of extra word. I think it would be fairly simple to just do surveys of different cultures around the world, including primitive cultures, to see how many of these different expressions are common. It would have to be done soon while our different cultures still maintain some of their distintness. I think this would make a good doctoral thesis for someone in the right field.