hindguts

Unfortunately, research associates the use of distiller's grains as feed with an increase in the incidence of E. coli in the hindguts of cattle.

Marler Blog 2008

Despite the fact that (1) gorillas and our ancestors diverged something like 7 million years ago, (2) we have undergone significant GI remodelling since (we don't have big hindguts for fermenting a herbivorous diet like they do for one thing, maybe in large part because of our co-evolution of cultural adaptations including toolmaking and control of fire that allowed a shift to a much more nutrient dense diet) and (3) we have come to subsist on very different diets – gorillas on mostly leaves, and human populations on a variety of plant to animal food ratios ranging up to near carnivory, our two species nonetheless still have gut microbiota that apparently put both in the omnivore ballpark.

Hard wired to the past | The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D. 2009