Interesting question. It made me imagine eons ago.
Tigers are carnivores. I was just wondering what percentage of their own energy needs to come from gluconeogenesis.
I’ve never seen a tiger, but I did see lots of lions. If tigers are a bit like lions, they rest most of the time, or move slowly. Their sprinting is reduced to a minimum. There’s no such a thing as an endurance running tiger. If they’re like lions.
Food for thought. Perhaps it was adding the carbs that made possible for us to do endurance type efforts, like running ultra marathons, cycling long distances.
Weeks ago I was reading about an ultra endurance female cyclist and she was saying she eats very low carb, keto WOE. I was very curious and digged deeper, because I love endurance exercise and my performance fell significantly after I’ve started very low carbing. I expected it to improve. I wanted to know her secret. When she’s training, or competing, she eats a lot of carbs. Best of both words. I’ve increased my net carbs just a little bit, from max 20 to max 30g and I’ve noticed less cramps and slightly better performance. But I think the slightly better performance is just due to less cramps. The cramps were… cramping my style.
I’ve also found a paper about an experiment with cyclists and the carby ones had an advantage.
Then I’ve remembered Froome. But he also eats lots of carbs when cycling.
Back to your gedanken experiment, I’m guessing tigers and friends were keeping our population low. As we started to eat carbs and got the extra kick and better working brains, we got rid of the tigers and our population exploded.
I’ve read a very good fiction book where two parallel universe earths were linked. In one of them, Neanderthals had won. The modern Neanderthals were carnivores and their world was beautiful, there were only 200 k people, mammoth and other such animals still existed. A paradise.