Modern hunter-gatherers offer insight into how our distant ancestors ate:
What did people eat for dinner tens of thousands of years ago? Many advocates of the so-called Paleo diet will tell you that our ancestors' plates were heavy on meat and low on carbohydrates—and that, as a result, we have evolved to thrive on this type of nutritional regimen.
The diet is named after the Paleolithic era, a period dating from about 2.5 million to 10,000 years ago when early humans were hunting and gathering, rather than farming. Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University and author of Burn, a book about the science of metabolism, says it's a myth that everyone of this time subsisted on meat-heavy diets. Studies show that rather than a single diet, prehistoric people's eating habits were remarkably variable and were influenced by a number of factors, such as climate, location and season.
In the 2021 Annual Review of Nutrition, Pontzer and his colleague Brian Wood, of the University of California, Los Angeles, describe what we can learn about the eating habits of our ancestors by studying modern hunter-gatherer populations like the Hadza in northern Tanzania and the Aché in Paraguay. In an interview with Knowable Magazine, Pontzer explains what makes the Hadza's surprisingly seasonal, diverse diets so different from popular notions of ancient meals.
Interview excerpts:
People have developed many different versions, but the original Paleo diet is quite meat-heavy. [...] But our ancestors' diets were really variable. We evolved as hunter-gatherers, so you're hunting and gathering whatever foods are around in your local environment. Humans are strategic about what foods they go after, but they can target only the foods that are there. So there was a lot of variation in what hunter-gathers ate depending on location and time of year.
The other thing is that, partly due to that variability, but also partly due just to people's preferences, there's a lot of carbohydrate in most hunter-gatherer diets. Honey was probably important throughout history and prehistory. A lot of these small-scale societies are also eating root vegetables like tubers, and those are very starch- and carb-heavy. So the idea that ancient diets would be low-carbohydrate just doesn't fit with any of the available evidence.
[...] Recently, there's been some really cool work looking at the little bit of plaque and calculus stuck to the teeth in fossilized hominids. If you look at that, you'll find remains of plants and starches. So we actually do have preserved evidence that early humans are eating lots of starchy vegetable foods. There's even some evidence of a primitive flourlike substance that's made out of grains. That kind of thing is anathema to most Paleo diets, which say that you can't eat grains because grains are a farmed food.
[...] Humans evolved to be adaptable. We are very much dependent on learning and developing these complex hoarding strategies to survive. And different people follow different paths. I think this adaptability is part of this whole package of how we live as a species. We're built to be flexible. And flexibility means diversity.
[...] I think the one thing that they never have in a hunter-gatherer diet is the heavily processed foods that we are surrounded with. In processed foods, you get these combinations of sugars, salts and fats that never occur in nature. You take out a lot of things like fiber and protein that make you feel full, and put in a lot of things that make your brain's reward systems light up, like flavoring. Processed foods seem to be a big driver of obesity.
Full interview at knowable Magazine
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Opportunist on Tuesday October 04 2022, @06:34AM (3 children)
Why the hell are we hell bent on doing what people did thousands of years ago? They also died when they were 40, do we also want to do that?
"But they didn't die of cancer and heart diseases!"
No, they didn't. Because the parasites, the food poisoning and the diseases got them before they could get old enough that heart diseases and cancer could develop!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 04 2022, @02:45PM (1 child)
Diet was an important component to our evolution, we were able to expend more energy developing a larger brain, which is a complete waste of huge amounts of energy if you don't use it. Wanting to return to a time before we'd evolved that bigger brain is an indicator of, well, I'll just let you use your own grey matter to work that out ;-)
And we ate fruits and roots (both packed with carbs) since time immemorial, there's nothing "all meat" about paleo diets, no matter what "The Paleo Diet", a modern book not written by someone who was not there at the time, might say. That's been known for ever. Meat was a treat, and we feasted when it was available. That doesn't mean our diet was meat feasts.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2022, @03:35AM
I watched a documentary about tribes in the Amazon. About once a month the men go out "hunting" and invariably catch 1 lizard. The rest of the time they eat a plant that is laboriously ground down and chewed by the women into a bland paste. That's a real paleo diet. Humans can't catch wild animals for shit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ze on Tuesday October 04 2022, @04:53PM
The idea is that our physiology hasn't substantially changed in that time, and as far as we can tell our diet and health got worse since we switched to agriculture that's optimized for yield and storage rather than whatever we're actually well adapted to eat. Meanwhile, also, average adult life expectancy hasn't ever changed that substantially according to any evidence we've found, most figures are skewed by the infant mortality rates which have.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2022, @07:25AM (2 children)
I'm starting on a Saleo diet. If it's on sale, I can afford to eat it.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2022, @12:46PM (1 child)
Literally me. Try the rice and beans!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 05 2022, @03:37AM
Thanks but I'll stick with boiled potatoes. I don't like fancy foreign muck.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday October 04 2022, @03:01PM (1 child)
The paleo diet was rather seasonal and opportunistic. They ate what they could get their hands on. If that meant in the spring they could get berries and green shoots, they ate that. If they got a deer or seal, they ate that. It also depended on where they were. Eskimos have a tough time supporting a vegan diet, so they eat a lot of fish and meat. Pigmies, on the other hand, can glean a lot from their jungle surroundings.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Wednesday October 05 2022, @02:59AM
Meat in one form or another is available year round.
Carbs are, in every form humans can digest, seasonal. If you're lucky they rotate so you can always get some. More often the non-growing or non-fruiting season (even if it's not winter as such) interferes, and the available window is short.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday October 06 2022, @01:28AM
There is not enough meat for everybody. Therefore slaves and suckers are made to eat carbs.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.