I agree with the headline (and so would the "Paleo diet" people, in quotes because that's marketing, not a historical claim), but the Hadza aren't my ancestors, or particularly closely related to them. That's true of non sub-Saharan people generally.
More importantly, no contemporary hunter-gatherers are a good model for pre-agricultural people (to call them hunter-gatherers at that time is to imply there were other sorts of people, which there were not). The remaining people practicing such a folkway live on marginal land, the harsh truth of human existence being that if it was rich enough for agriculture, or good for pastoralism, those lifestyles would have won out.
Evidence for eating anything we could get our hands on, including quite a bit of meat, is abundant in paleoarchaeology.
What no one ate as much of is grains, specifically ground grains. We know this because, while grinding stones date back hundreds of thousands of years, the tooth wear patterns which indicate a diet primarily based on flour are not evident in remains until agriculture.
My point being that the Hadza speciality in honey-scavenging is much like the Inuit speciality in seals: it's an adaptation to circumstances which suits them, but probably doesn't teach us much about how we can eat healthy, or much about how our pre-agricultural ancestors tended to eat.
> The remaining people practicing such a folkway live on marginal land, the harsh truth of human existence being that if it was rich enough for agriculture, or good for pastoralism, those lifestyles would have won out.
That's a bit too harsh, and I spent a couple weeks living with the Hadza at one point. Even went honey-gathering with them up into a Baobab tree, although I was too scared to stick my hand in. They live in the African savannah, which is where humankind first evolved. Olduvai Gorge, where some of the oldest hominid fossils have been found, is basically next door to the Hadza. So while yes, Intuits are adapted to "extreme" conditions, the Hadza are living in the most "native human" conditions possible. It is anything but marginal, as there has been no evidence or history of famine ever in the Hadza people.
It is true that the area is ill-suited for agriculture, which is why the Hadza have remained, but agriculture is a very recent invention in evolutionary terms. That doesn't make the savannah "marginal". Also, the idea that you're not particularly closely related to the Hadza is obviously false, since we all share an ancestry with the original sub-Saharan hominids. If you're of European descent, for example, you share more with the Hadza than you do with those of East Asian descent -- as they also share more with the Hadza than they would with you.
You're correct in that this might not have much applicability to a modern diet, but it is valuable in puncturing myths such as the idea that "paleo" people never ate anything high in sugar. I do personally wonder if things like honey were common worldwide, though, whether it's berries or saps or syrups or similar.
"If you're of European descent, for example, you share more with the Hadza than you do with those of East Asian descent -- as they also share more with the Hadza than they would with you."
How? Hadza would be about 3/1000th Neanderthal while both Europens and East Asians are about 20/1000th. Because home sapiens mated with them after leaving Africa and there wasn't much gene flow back into Africa. Even if that weren't the case I don't understand the reasoning behind your comment.
In a nutshell it's about genetic diversity. Subsaharan Africans include virtually all of the set of homo sapiens genes (save for mutations that occurred later on elsewhere), while populations outside of Africa have only select subsets of genes, due to the limited diversity in small migratory groups.
So if you're European, for example, nearly all the genes you have can also be found in the Subsaharan African population, but many of your genes can't be found in the East Asian population at all.
(I'm not considering Neanderthal genes at all, as those are a comparatively very small portion of genes.)
I'm not an expert in this and I don't have numbers here, but this is what I was taught in college anthropology at least regarding genetic variation worldwide.
That's true but I don't see how the earlier claim necessarily follows. It seems to be making assumptions around the amount of gene flow between Europe and Asia in the last 30k years, as well as that it was distinct migratory groups that seeded Europe versus seeded Asia.
It could well be true, it's plausible, I tried to google it without much luck, though.
From what I know it based purely on current measurable genetics, it's not making any assumptions at all. It's the genetic evidence that comes first that supports the hypothesis of distinct migratory groups, not the other way around.
to your point, a version of this i learned was that, if you had the magic ability to select two humans with the greatest genetic distance between them on the planet, those two people would both be sub-Saharan Africans.
In the northern hemisphere, only meat could sustain humans through winter. The cold also kept the meat better longer.
I have to imagine that over a few hundred thousand years the savannah changed as well as the world as a whole. We are probably adapted based on our genetics rather substantially to particular diets.
I can imagine gathering berries and honey would be more common in temperate or tropical climates. But in the colder climates milk, cheese, eggs and meat had to be a larger percentage of the diet.
“They live in the African savannah, which is where humankind first evolved”
We have some evidence to suggest that early humans were there but it is a huge assumption and leap of faith to make a statement like this with certainty. This statement is more likely a religious statement than one a good scientist would make.
A good scientist would not make such a bold assumption without putting it in quotes or a star next to it. You cannot make this statement definitively.
Do you believe it is in fact established? Science discovers new ‘facts’ all the time. To say definitively that humans first evolved here in the context of a 4 billion year old planet seems irresponsible at best.
My understanding is that the known fossil record is extremely clear on this, and is additionally quite consistent to the extent where I'm unaware of any competing hypotheses that are taken seriously.
As far as science goes, it seems to be as established as it gets. Again, unless you've got convincing evidence to the contrary. Really not sure what your agenda is here?
Plenty of competing theories on the origins of humanity on a 4 billion year old planet some in which the origins of life came from elsewhere in the universe.
I think this may be the most recent evidence that modern science has discovered.
Perhaps you mean to say we wont dig up any fossils that say otherwise and that the case is closed?
As if the entirety of the fossil record on earth has been exhausted and we have nothing more to discover.
My agenda is to make sure we are being good scientists and not religious about our findings.
The climate and available foods near Olduvai Gorge were quite different when hominids evolved there. I suspect the current Hadza diet is substantially different from that of our ancient ancestors. Temporal distance matters as much as geographic distance.
Evidence for eating anything we could get our hands on, including quite a bit of meat, is abundant in paleoarchaeology.
This is quite far from the truth. The hadza are specific about the foods they gather and are known to have a number of food taboos. Women and children are forbidden from eating hearts, for example, while men can't eat tortoises.
Also, the carbs in the title are primarily coming from tubers, often called underground storage organs (USOs) in the literature. Grain is a much later thing, as you mentioned.
The thing you're critiquing is ethnographic analogy. The sucks doesn't do a good job of clarifying this, but the accepted modern usage is not to say "this is exactly how ancient humans lived", but rather to illuminate a small part of the spectrum of possible lifeways and what constraints they might have been optimizing.
One thing it teaches us is that meat & animal products, especially fat, has been a central part of the diet for most of our ancestral tribal cultures.
Since dairy, meat and animal fats are being vilified at the moment by the modern nutritional zeitgeist. It might be worth being skeptical of such a strong rejection of these food categories.
Especially since we can't figure out the root causes of certain modern diseases as autoimmune, extreme rise in cancers, neurological and heart disease.
A large part from that is due to the abhorrent conditions that most meat is produced in and the fact that (IIRC) livestock amounts to 15 times the biomass of all wild mammals combined right now. If you tally up land used to feed livestock and all the other side effects of the meat industry, it doesn't look very sustainable to me. It's kinda hard to have almost 8 billion people live like hunter gatherers I guess.
I eat grass-fed local cows and its almost half the price per lb as regular ground beef at Walmart, and obviously includes every cut there is.
We probably need to increase the number of farms and farmers, and decentralize agriculture. Bonus side effect: it’s more resilient to shocks like Covid taking out a few meat packing plants or a natural disaster taking out the massive Smithfield facility in Virginia.
Having consumed something for a long time doesn’t mean that thing fits our health goals today. e.g. saturated fat contributes to heart disease but didn’t stop us from reproducing.
There is no evidence that it causes heart disease:
"Collectively, neither observational studies, prospective epidemiologic cohort studies, RCTs, systematic reviews and meta analyses have conclusively established a significant association between SFA in the diet and subsequent cardiovascular risk and CAD, MI or mortality nor a benefit of reducing dietary SFAs on CVD rick, events and mortality. Beneficial effects of replacement of SFA by polyunsaturated or monounsaturated fat or carbohydrates remain elusive.
"
The point is. There are certain diseases much more prevelant now than in these tribal cultures. Why is that? Less exposure to parasites, food, movement, exposure to chemicals?
The best evidence we have now is that sugar consumption is a far worse risk factor for heart disease than saturated fat. The amount of saturated fat in your bloodstream has little relation to the amount you eat.
A US president succumbed to smoking induced heart attacks but the tobacco industry can't be the culprit right? Nah, it must have been a human staple that humans consumed for thousands of years. We should instead eat food that was only readily available for 300 years and only that.
Ware patterns are a very long term effect. Hunter gathering was a seasonal diet so they would have eaten more grains in some periods and less in others.
In areas with abundant natural grains it’s likely their diets did consist primarily of grains for some portion of the year. From a survival standpoint low effort and especially low risk calories are really hard to ignore.
There is nothing low effort about grains. They don't simply grow abundantly in nature without other animals eating them. In addition, before manual cultivation, wild, non selectively bred grains were nothing like modern grains.
We’ve forgotten how many cultures ate acorns when they were available. Acorns are about 40% carbs. Unlike apples and many other tree nuts, there’s not a lot of evidence they have been selectively bred for larger fruits. “Native” oaks produce a noteworthy amount of nuts.
But the thing with nuts is that they have multi year cycles to break the foraging ladder. Every few years the whole forest produces five times as many seeds as in a normal year, and then famine and predation pulls the nut eating population back down.
Only humans are clever enough to really exploit those patterns. A child would learn to make acorn bread, but couldn’t count on it being available except for short periods and then every so many years.
[edit to add] if memory serves, in the modern era we are down to some First Nations populations and Korea for cultures that still eat acorns regularly.
Yes, but, acorns stand out as one of the starchiest nuts, which is why they make bread out of it.
A modern walnut for instance is about 18g of fat, 4 of protein, and 4 of carbs per ounce. And while the size of the fruit would have been increased under cultivation, I'm not sure the mix of nutrients would have shifted all that far. A 'modern' acorn is 6.8:1.7:11.5. That is a starch.
The limiting factor with acorns is that if you eat them raw the tannins will get you. You have to soak it out before eating them. We've had pottery for at least twice as long as the time since the end of the Paleolithic era. If soaked in leather bags or nets, then much older than that. And since oak tannins are one of the older techniques for processing leather, I think it's safe to say we've been collecting them since the back end of forever.
Canadian wild rice for example gets extremely abundant without simply being eaten by wild animals. That’s likely representative of what similar ecosystems in other areas would have looked like.
In terms of energy gained vs lost harvesting and processing Canadian wild rice using traditional methods is a huge net gain. That said in terms of diet, wild grains have a noticeably different nutritional profile so aren’t a direct analog of of modern agriculture.
That might be true, but humans have had granaries to store grains and whatever else they can gather, for more than ten thousand years. Whatever the effort was, we know people were gathering grains like corn. You can visit granaries all over the American west. They’re in South America and the Middle East as well, along with some evidence that manual cultivation was taking place ten thousand years ago https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26314333_Evidence_f...
> that if it was rich enough for agriculture, or good for pastoralism, those lifestyles would have won out.
Have you read Guns, Germs and Steel? Agriculture and Colonialism went together, club and hand, not fork and hand. Agriculture didn’t win so much as it conquered the world at spear point.
I’ve even read a few feminist things recently that tie sexism to agriculture, one even claims that the plow is the worst thing to happen to women. That gives a much darker sentiment to “beating swords into plowshares”.
Guns, Germs, and Steel is thoroughly discredited pop science. And even then you’re misrepresenting its claims.
Look to David Reich and his students for actual evidence based science on human migrations.
And of course there are virtually no impartial contemporary works on the Age of Exploration, because the politics of our day require vilifying those civilizations.
The objective reality is that the colonial period was just one of many human migrations. It wasn’t the worst, it wasn’t the first, it’s not the last, and there will be more, including the largest mass migrations in human history occurring right now.
How about 1491? He straight up claims the arrival of manioc in Africa contributed to a population boom that presaged the slave trade.
Agricultural societies can subjugate conquered lands so much faster than hunter gatherer and nomadic peoples. It takes far longer to adapt to native food sources than to bring in annual crops that not only take but a few years to establish, but also require removing the forests and prairies of the defeated culture to do it. There is nothing for you here anymore. Assimilate to your new masters.
Also if anyone has refuted that patterns of conquest around the world have been highly amplified in east-west bands because of the biomes those territories represent, I’d love to hear it.
> Agricultural societies can subjugate conquered lands so much faster than hunter gatherer and nomadic peoples.
Nomadic people are quite capable of conquering land, the most obvious example being Genghis Khan, who managed to build the Mongol empire into the largest in human history.
It is true there is a general trend in history of agricultural societies displacing hunter/gather societies, but that's simply because agriculture generates more calories per square kilometer than a hunter/gatherer lifestyle. As populations grow beyond the carrying capacity of the natural environment, hunter/gatherers either forced to adopt agriculture or get conquered by the larger armies of those people that have.
Europe had a considerable population predating the Age of Exploration, while I won't commit to calling it causal, enclosure is attributed as one of the reasons for the AoE in texts. And enclosure was at least in part driven by agriculture. So you can call it what you may, but I would call socioeconomically driven violent ingress into previously occupied territories colonialism and not migration.
> the harsh truth of human existence being that if it was rich enough for agriculture, or good for pastoralism, those lifestyles would have won out.
I don't buy this explanation at all. You could say the exact opposite: their land provides so well that they don't need to. I'm find with not knowing which, that's up to scientists who actually study that; not something that can be deduced a priori.
I think you're missing the point... agriculture allows for greater population density and specialization, which makes armies possible (not to mention technology leading to superior armaments), which in turn means that when the two enter into conflict, the militarized agricultural society wins. It's not a value judgement about which lifestyle is better, but if hunter-gatherers live on land that's good for agriculture, then eventually an agricultural society will want that land, and the rest is history. This old story is still playing out today, with the very few hunter-gatherers remaining being wiped out as we speak.
I think you're missing the point... the only reason you'd need any of that is if it were useful to you. If your environment provides everything you need, then it isn't. Everything you describe needs to be driven by needs. If those needs don't exist because all wants are satisfied in such a society, then there's no push or pull to do all of that. I think you're basing your comment on the assumption that they're missing out on something, but this is exactly what I'm challenging. If you wanted to convince me, you'd have to establish without a doubt that they do have the shit land and that they live in poverty and don't get what they need and are completely marginalized; however, that's far from what I've seen in documentations about them (ignoring notable exceptions.)
"What no one ate as much of is grains, specifically ground grains."
From the article...
"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."
Can't have evidence mucking up your belief system eh?
I've read similar missives like this before, and I've always felt that they are at least somewhat of a strawman. The primary feature I always have associated with paleo is no processed carbs. That is, no flour or sugar. But certainly things like fruit and root vegetables are always fine, and encouraged.
Yes, some paleo adherents make it very meat heavy, and others combine paleo with low carb generally. But when I see articles like this saying "All paleo people think about is meat, meat, meat", I feel like they're arguing against some very limited, specific version of paleo that is not the norm.
I do feel they make a good point about honey, though.
Honey throws a huge wrench in the paleo argument: it's essentially a 100% processed/refined sugar of which the Hadza in particular consume huge amounts with no ill effect.
Matter of fact seems to be that if you can use the calories, there is nothing wrong with getting them separate from nutrients. A highly active person might need twice as many calories as his sedentary twin but only 20-30% more nutrients to sustain himself, and the difference can pretty much come from anywhere.
You can see the same phenomenon in elite athletes: Andre Agassi for instance ran almost exclusively on candy and McDonalds for most of his career.
How relevant is this for most of us? Very little. We'll do better eating more "primitive" foods and less processed ones etc etc.
As you concede we shouldn't take away too many lessons from the Hadza unless we too hunt for our food with hand-made bows and arrows and forage for edible plants. Takes lots of calories to do that, calories which don't lie around waiting to be turned into fat. A point you make about other very active people. No ill effect due to diet? Not sure about that given their life span though of course causes of death may be entirely unrelated to diet especially with their tough life style. We should also remember our very varied genetic inheritance as illustrated in stories of the 'my grandfather smoked like a chimney and died at 93' genre. True in my case but it's a risky bet to assume you've got the same genes.
They ate honeycomb, which is very different from the refined honey you’d find in a grocery store. Comb has large amounts of protein from pollen and bee larvae.
You actually don’t eat bee larvae when you’re eating honeycomb. bees separate out their hives so certain sections have honey, certain sections have larvae, etc. Gathering and eating honeycomb mostly consists of selecting the primarily honey sections of comb. The comb itself has very little to no nutritional value, not even fiber.
Honey and table sugar are not the same. In honey the fructose and glucose are side by side but not chemically joined (monosaccharides) in sucrose they are joined together (disaccharide) these require different gut bacteria to break down and can plausibly have different biological effects when consumed.
Actually the Hadza DID suffer an ill-effect for all that honey they ate. I'll quote below what I wrote in a different thread that talked about this article:
Something that the article fails to mention is that unlike the indigenous people who didn't consume as much honey (like Inuit before they were introduced to refined carbs) the Hadza had high incidence of dental caries among those who commonly ate honey:
"The unexpected discovery of high caries incidences for men in the bush is likely explained by heavy reliance on honey, and perhaps differential access to tobacco and marijuana."
The Alaskan Inuits who didn't eat nearly as much carbs, had far fewer incidences of dental caries until the introduction of refined carbohydrates:
"In 1965, the dietary intake was conducted by the ‘interview method’ plus personal observations when visiting all of the families during meal times. Bang and Kristoffersen ‘…contacted all of the Eskimos involved in the study questioning each individual in detail about what food and roughly how much of each food item he consumed in the course of the year’.1 The authors noted a dramatic increase in carbohydrate intake of ‘nearly 50%’ and a decrease in the intake of protein ‘by about 50%’ from 1955 to 1957 to 1965.1 This rise in the intake of carbohydrate was paralleled by an ‘almost 90% increase’ in the sum of decayed, missing and filled permanent teeth for primary teeth (from 3.0 to 5.6) and a fourfold increase in those >6 years old, ‘the percentage of caries-free persons had decreased from 74.5% to zero in 8 years…While 50% of the children in 1955–1957 had caries-free primary teeth all the children had decayed teeth in 1965…The most dramatic change was observed in individuals 30 years of age or older. In this previously caries-free group, all subjects had developed caries in 1965’.1 Thus, the Alaskan Inland Inuit that had subsided on a diet virtually devoid of carbohydrate for most of their life who did not have any dental caries between 1955 and 1957 had all developed dental caries by 1965; in the interim, the intake of carbohydrate had increased by 50%."
Here's also an interesting sidenote regarding the evolution of cavities:
"Stanhope and his colleagues were also able to pinpoint some of the genes that were important for Streptococcus mutans’s adaptation to civilization. Fourteen genes, for example, show signs of having experienced strong natural selection. Some of those evolved genes are essential for breaking down sugar. Others help the bacteria survive in the acidic conditions that arise in the mouth when we eat starches.
Perhaps most intriguing of all the genes in Streptococcus mutans are the 148 that Stanhope and his colleagues found in every human strain, but in none of the related bacteria in the mouths of other animals. The best explanation for this is that Streptococcus mutans picked these 148 genes up from other species in our bodies. Once Streptococcus mutans grabbed these genes, it didn’t let them go.
The function of the genes hints at their value. Some provide additional help at breaking down sugar. Others create more defenses against low pH. Others produce toxins that can kill off other species of bacteria that are competing with Streptococcus mutans for the spoils of civilization.
These adaptations have made Streptococcus mutans spectacularly successful, and they’ve also provided us with a lot of misery. The cavities would be bad enough. Archaeological evidence indicates that cavities went from rare to common with the advent of agriculture. Making matters, worse, however, is the fact that when Streptococcus mutans gets into the bloodstream through the gums, it can make its way to the heart and cause problems there, too."
> I feel like they’re arguing against some very limited, specific version of paleo that is not the norm.
What is the “norm” for paleo? Genuinely curious. I guess there’s a distribution that ranges from instagram/gym culture to product advertisement to serious scientific anthropology. The problem, I think, is that there are many, many more people sharing the instagram/gym talking points than there are anthropologists. So if the norm is defined by number of people advocating the benefits of a paleo diet, I’d argue the “meat, meat, meat” view is far and away more common than the idea that the actual diet of ancient humans includes corn, potatoes, and honey. The meat view is certainly what I’ve heard the most of when the word “paleo” is being used. BTW heard a podcast recently that touched on how the paleo advertising for dog food, arguing that dogs’ ancestors are wild wolves and only ate meat, was making dogs sick because modern domesticated dogs are evolved for a heavy carb diet.
People have been processing foods since the beginning. (1) Changing texture by removing rough parts, beating into mushes. (2) Heat processing, boiling, roasting, frying, soups. (3) Dehydrating, drying (4) Fermenting.
Modern industrial food processing uses machines and mass production. Adds chemicals like sugar, starch, salt, spice, nitrates, phosphates ... Probably too much of this.
Last I checked, paleo was seriously anti normal potatoes, and very pro sweet-potatoes/yams, with some pseudo-science about the difference being one is a descendant of the nightshade.
They over-stress the hunter and under-stress the gatherer. Yes, meat is calorie-dense and without preservation doesn't last long, likely leading to gorging when it was available. But hunting takes energy and isn't always successful. Depending on meat as a sole (or dominant) food source wasn't a winning strategy. People had to eat fruit and vegetables when available or we wouldn't be here.
Assuming there are no high-fat seeds or nuts in large amount available then hunting has a extemely higher gain-to-expenditure energy ratio than gathering plants, especially if you hunt sheep or larger sized animals.
I think due to confirmation bias people seem to gravitate to the extremes—the mostly hunter vs mostly gatherer dietary arguments. People seem to miss that our bodies adapted to being able to basically use two forms of energy…glucose or fats and our bodies will try to adapt to run on whichever fuel is most abundant in our environment. It’s one of the reason why our species managed settle in and survive in both the arctic and the kalahari
Around the time some bees moved into my house I did a lot of reading about them and was amazed that they are so prevalent in the tropics and particular Africa.
We lived with them for a few years and eventually they moved out and a beekeeper we consulted with set up some hives in our wet meadow which produce some of the best tasting honey I’ve ever had.
I think they probably abbreviated Herman Pontzer's first sentence too much and the title is kind of misleading, in the book Burn, it is quite clear that Pontzer believes Paleo as practiced by most people today is a misreading of all the historical evidence. There are footnotes for every proposition in the book if one is interested in following up to the original studies.
"People have developed many different versions, but the original Paleo diet is quite meat-heavy." Then later in the interview he says the evidence supports a more varied diet in archaelogical record and the Hazda as if he contradicts himself.
The interview uses the phrase Paleo diet for the modern form and the historical interchangeably so they should have done more to make that clear when they are referring to the former and the latter.
In the book he talks about how even the meat heavy diet of Aleuts and Maasai include as much vegetable matter as they can get, they do not avoid carbohydrates.
I would highly recommend the book as it is relatively short until one follows the links to read the studies.
This diet discussion is only a chapter I think, the book is more about the double labeled water studies and conclusions.
I always assumed that Paleo didn't mean "no carbs", it meant "modeled after pre-agricultural diets", but that mainly the term Paleo was marketing anyway. I think Paleo adherents might say that it doesn't much matter what paleolithic man ate, what matters is what's healthy for modern man, which (they believe) is what their diet represents. So this kind of anthropological counterargument won't convince anyone, though it may make some people feel a smug sense of satisfaction.
Our Ancestors probably ate whatever they could get their hands on. Lots of fruit/berries included.
The fact is that the average 'early farmer' skeleton is shorter and looks less healthy from the hunter gatherers.
That can means that grains (the bulk of the carbs back then), while reliable and a necessity at the time (due to population density), are not necessary better.
If you want to look like a caveman, meat and fruits and other simple veggies should be your diet.
The health problems of the early farmers are not surprising because they lacked the modern knowledge about nutrients, e.g. that cereals do not have enough lysine, legumes do not have enough methionine, both of them do not contain adequate quantities of some vitamins and minerals, and so on.
So the first farmers probably had very unbalanced diets in comparison with their ancestors, or with the much later farmers.
Even if during a relatively short time of maybe a few centuries at most, the cultivation of at least 6 different plant species has begun (3 cereals, 2 legumes and flax), it is likely that in the beginning there was no group of humans who cultivated all of them. It is more likely that each group has started to cultivate just one crop, but later they exchanged experiences and the crops whose cultivation was successful spread all over the area.
It is likely that many years or even centuries were necessary until the early farmers developed an empirical knowledge about how to cook and mix multiple cultivated plants to make a healthy diet, including details like that the legumes must be soaked for some time and washed before cooking, for reducing the amount of phytic acid and other harmful substances, and so on.
There's actual data on ancestral diets from preserved human bodies discovered in places like glaciers and anaerobic peat bogs. For example, here's a paper on two Iron-Age bog bodies:
"An archaeological interpretation of Irish Iron Age bog bodies (2013)" by EP Kelly
> "Scientific analysis of the chemical constituents of the hair and fingernails provided information on the diets of the two men in the months preceding their deaths. Clonycavan Man had a plant-based diet for four months prior to his death, suggesting that he may have died during the autumn before the onset of a meat-rich winter diet. By contrast, Oldcroghan Man may have died in the winter or early spring, as he ate a diet with a substantial meat component during the four months prior to his death."
Diets likely varied globally based on local conditions - seasonal variation was likely the dominant factor in food sources for people living in the mid-latitudes and polar areas (winter/summer) as well as in the tropics (wet/dry), and people near oceans would likely be eating ocean-sourced food.
This was likely true for both nomadic hunter-gatherer groups as well as simple subsistence farmers and herders.
Well, people live at least twice as long, on average, as in paleo times so much of the damage from that diet wasn’t observed in the fossil record due to the lack of really old skeletons. Must have food surpluses to value the old and infirm…
Also, the exercise of those in paleo times is staggeringly better than today’s carnivores. Good for the heart, even though fat was prized as a calorie source.
Our ancestors didn't have television, the internet, desk jobs, etc. While we can debate the finer points of Paleo, or similar, there's no reason to debate the standard modern Western diet. It sucks. Full stop. It - and its associated lifestyle - is generally unhealthy.
I’ve been into nutrition for a few years now, with my entry point originally being paleo. I have no medical training. Paleo has been shown to be off base, but eating a low carb diet and limiting gluten is a fine diet. Some of the nonsense in nutrition includes:
- Carnivore, the dumbest diet ever created
- Anti seed-oil people
- Anti-soy people
- People who say ketosis can cure anything (and I’m in ketosis)
Like most things, these diets are usually adopted because they make you feel good, on accident. Carnivore is great if you have allergies to food you’re unaware of. Keto generally works by making you eat less food. Paleo helps you cut out garbage. All of these things are good for some people, none of them are good for the narrative they sell.
Aggressive statements work better with sources, evidence or at the very least anecdotes. Otherwise, your comment is just as nonsensical as the state of nutritional science.
Which nutrition science specifically? Much of the nutrition "science" out there is basically junk, invalidated by uncontrolled variables and the healthy subject effect.
Unless you've recently watched one of your own children starve to death and die then you are not on the Paleo diet. Before the Industrial Revolution (and linked Agricultural Revolution) humans spent roughly 10% of their lives facing famine conditions. This would typically be concentrated into a few famine years, or perhaps a recurring dry season, depending on where you lived. But that averages out to going 3 days a month without any food. So unless you do a complete 3 day fast each month, then you are not on the Paleo diet.
It is known there are many health benefits to fasting. Why is that? It is likely that, after tens of millions of years of surviving episodes of famine, our bodies simply leave certain vital tasks to moments of famine, and therefore if you don't inflict famine on yourself, your body is going without an important reset which used to imposed on us by outside circumstances.
Yeah, it had carbs. Just not nearly as many as this anthropologist wants to believe. Studying modern "hunter gatherer" populations is not a particularly scientific way to judge what it was that our human ancestors and their related species were actually eating several thousands or millions of years ago. Doing so might instigate some interesting questions, but there's clear and obvious limitations to studying a scant few tribes that can be considered hunter-gatherer in an era where it's nearly impossible not to have some form of contact with the "civilized" world.
> I would say the same is true of the predominant Paleo diets today — most are very meat-heavy and low-carb, downplaying things like starchy vegetables and fruits that would only have been seasonally available before agriculture.
That is if they even would have been available at all. Fruits and starchy vegetables in their current form are almost unrecognizable to their evolutionary counterparts millions, thousands, or even hundreds of years ago in many cases. The starchy tubers that early modern humans sometimes ate were fibrous, not particularly starchy in contrast to agricultured sources of starch like pretty much any variety of potato. Fruits are no different. The vast, vast majority of fruits before agriculture were not abundant in fruit flesh; they had enough flesh such that it encouraged animals to consume and poop out the seeds (if that was the strategy of the particular plant). Plants did not have the same pressure they do now to produce highly fleshy fruit at a genetic level as they do now because the energy and substrate were not there.
> But our ancestors’ diets were really variable.
Depends on which ancestors and when. When you look at the 4 million years prior to the last 30k years, our diet was not particularly variable. This has been confirmed by stable carbon and nitrogen isotope testing of bone collagen found in human remains. Not dental calculus or tools or other things that are speculative. Humans ate mostly meat to the point where it was nearly exclusive.
> We evolved as hunter-gatherers, so you’re hunting and gathering whatever foods are around in your local environment.
We are hunter-scavengers, for the most part. Under most circumstances, the natural environment, in terms of plants, does not have enough available net energy to be a comparable strategy to hunting or raising animals that do. Unless you're fortunate enough to be around something like an acorn tree at the right time of year, your choice is to kill and immediately eat the flesh of an animal or to eat leaves and fibrous roots of plants of which there is comparatively very little nutrition or available energy. Harvesting, processing, and passing mostly indigestible plant material is not nearly as efficient or nutritious as killing and eating animals. Gathering was and still is a distantly second strategy that opportunistic humans use to extend their chances of survivability.
> 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.
Depends on what "a lot" means. Plants fruit, animals migrate. Doesn't mean that the majority of environments early humans were living in were cornucopias of food worth eating.
> 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.
Depends on what you mean by carbohydrate. Assuming you're not lumping indigestible fiber into this, the premodern earth was not full of starch and sugar.
> Honey was probably important throughout history and prehistory.
Sure, when it was available and when you were willing to get stung. There was never enough honey at any point in prehistory to be a meaningful source of energy that humans were optimized to rely on. It was a supplemental and tasty form of supplemental energy if it could be obtained.
> A lot of these small-scale societies are also eating root vegetables like tubers, and those are very starch- and carb-heavy.
No, they were not particularly starch heavy at all, all things being relative. Heavy compared to what? Compared to the root vegetables available to us today, not even close.
> So the idea that ancient diets would be low-carbohydrate just doesn’t fit with any of the available evidence.
Complete nonsense. Humans ate carbohydrates, but available and digestible carbohydrates were mostly not available in abundance until humans figured out how to manipulate their own environment. On a scale of pure energy investment, gathering loses almost every time to modestly skilled hunting based on human nutritional needs.
> I think there are a couple of reasons for that. You have a kind of romanticizing of what hunting and gathering was like.
That's really what you're doing here. Using anecdoes about specific modern tribes eating honey is a form of romanticizing paleolithic and pre-paleolithic human existence, which for the most part was harsh and brutal.
> There is a sort of macho caveman view of the past that permeates a lot of what I read when I look at Paleo diet websites.
Maybe that's because later stone age humans were more macho than we are both in terms of testosterone level and overall phenotype. The longer that early human species adapted to eating meat and away from primarily fruit-eating, the more "masculinized" their phenotype. A reverse effect has been proposed for why modern humans of the last 30,000 years are somewhat less masculine-appearing than their recent hunter-gatherer predecessors.
One doesn't even need to be aware of the fossil record at all. Take any two twins, feed one only meat feed the other one mostly carbohydrates and guess which one will have higher androgen levels.
> There are also inherent biases in a lot of the available archaeological and ethnographic data. In the early 1900s, and even before, a lot of the ethnographic reports were written by men who focused on men’s work.
Anything that men do is sexist. We got it.
> We know that traditionally that’s going to focus more on hunting than on gathering because of the way a lot of these small-scale societies divide their work: Men hunt and women gather.
Yes. Male and female humans have differing phenotypes and tradeoffs that encourage them to organize themselves into different specialties. It really doesn't make sense in most cases for females, who only have so many eggs available at limited times to have a limited number of offspring, to go hunting or fight other tribes. Females who are pregnant and literally can't hunt can still gather and process food among other things. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with tradition.
> On top of that, the available ethnographic data is heavily skewed toward very northern cultures, such as Arctic cultures — since the warm-weather cultures were the first ones to get pushed out by farmers — and they do tend to eat more meat.
There historically have been more large ruminant animals in the northern hemisphere. Southern environments have less land mass and
> But our ancestors’ diets were variable.
Yes, humans are opportunists.
> Populations that lived near the ocean and moving rivers ate a lot of fish and seafood.
In other words, when meat is available, it's the obvious choice and has a positive correlation with survival, far more so than if all that's around are plants with inferior nutritional value.
> There is also a bias toward hunting in the archaeological record. Stone tools and cut-marked bones — evidence of hunting — preserve very well. Wooden sticks and plant remains don’t.
Because stone tools surely would have no use at all for processing, cutting open, and eating plants? Surely early humans would have never used sharp and pointy rocks to process acorns, break open coconuts, dig up and cut out roots, and so forth. No way they did any such thing. They just took bites right out of plants and used wooden sticks for everything.
You're ignoring the stable isotope data that doesn't match your conception that prehistoric humans ate "a lot" of carbs.
> Your research has focused a lot on a group called the Hadza.
Exactly. One tribe.
> People have been working with the Hadza for decades now, so we have these long-term records, papers published from 30 or 40 years ago up through to today.
That hardly sounds like anything near a form of a controlled study of a genuine hunter gatherer society that supposedly reflects hunter gatherers in general thousands and millions of years ago. Like I said, such study can lead to a lot of interesting questions, but the answers are where the anthropology mostly ends and science begins.
> [A] lot of the work there kind of sparked this — is how important honey is. It can make up as much as a fifth of the group’s calories, on average. Honey is just sugar and water — pretty high-carb and definitely not part of most modern “Paleo” diets.
I'm sure that's a situation that would have applied to the vast majority of premodern human groups at any particular time. You don't even mention what species of bees are producing this honey. Were there bees around in the paleolithic era that were capable of producing the copious amounts of honey that modern western honey bees do?
> The birds have adapted to a world in which humans get a lot of honey. I think that’s really telling.
That's not telling of anything other than that a couple of intelligent species have learned to work to each other's shared advantage in this one particular circumstance.
> 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.
Sure, if you ignore all the other research on dental calculus that shows populations of humans ate exclusively meat. Even the groups of humans that were found with plant material in their calculus still usually weren't subsisting primarily on plants or "a lot of starch."
> There’s even some evidence of a primitive flourlike substance that’s made out of grains.
That doesn't mean it's optimal or reflective of what our human ancestors primarily developed to survive on for over 4 million years. Eating grains can have a survival benefit, but some evidence that some early humans ate some amount of grain doesn't necessarily confirm that this is a reason to introduce starch into one's diet as a modern human.
> That kind of thing is anathema to most Paleo diets, which say that you can’t eat grains because grains are a farmed food.
Maybe that's because paleolithic humans weren't eating shittons of grains and because grains have properties that are deleterious to the human body. I'm sure there were some paleolithic humans that ate clay when food was scarce. Does that mean we should be eating clay?
> And you can look at the human body and see how we’ve adapted relative to our ape relatives — what’s changed in us in terms of how we digest food.
Yes, you can, and I'm sure you'll interpret such information correctly.
> You can look at things like gut anatomy and tooth shape.
Yes, you can. Our gut anatomy, in several ways, reflects that of hypercarnivores. In some ways, it reflects carnivory more than animals like cats, which eat exclusively meat; our stomachs highly acidic and our cecum is next to nonexistent, hence we are far better suited to digest meat than to process cellulose.
Our tooth shape really doesn't mean what you think it means. The advantage of pointy teeth in most animals is that they are effective for hunting their prey. I don't recall ever hearing about humans chasing and killing animals with their teeth. Humans also don't seem to have a problem eating meat with their teeth.
> And if you look at that, again, the signal is kind of omnivorous. It isn’t particularly meat-heavy.
Total unadulterated nonsense. The only way you can come to this conclusion is if you deny the mountains of evidence that dwarf your view that early humans were eating a bunch of starch.
Just because humans can eat plants doesn't mean they're optimal. Most species, including rats, develop to specialize towards a particular food substrate. Giving either humans or rats a bunch of carbs is demonstrably not health promoting for either species, despite rats being even more opportunistic than humans, despite their penchant for eating garbage.
> I think this adds to the evidence that humans can be healthy on a wide range of diets.
They can be, yes. That doesn't mean someone is wrong for eating a "Paleo" diet, which you seem to have a motivation to deboonk. Some diets are more optimal than others.
> I hope it helps tamp down some of the yelling on both sides about how you have to have a plant-based diet or you have to have a meat-based diet, or you have to have another kind of diet.
No one "has" to eat anything they don't want to. What people want to do is eat a diet that they believe is most optimal for them.
> Humans evolved to be adaptable.
And other animals haven't? Plenty of animals are "adaptable", whatever that means. Cows will eat meat if you put it in front of them. That doesn't mean it's optimal for their health in either the short or long term. Does the fact that most other animals can consume a variety of things and survive suggest they are "adaptable"?
We might be more adaptable in the sense that we believe ourselves to have the most advanced minds on the planet, thus we ca make analytical decisions that other animals either can't or take extremely long amounts of time to do. This effectively explains the invention of agriculture and livestock. That much better represents our adaptability than whether we can consume carbohydrates.
> And people who are vegan, and eat no meat at all, can do really well, too.
They can, but often don't.
Vegan diets have some advantages over a standard modern diet, namely that it doesn't activate the Randle Cycle if their consumption of fats is scant. This is one reason why people who switch to a vegan diet can feel better; their blood sugar is better regulated despite primarily eating carbohydrate.
A potential disadvantage of vegan diets is that, despite the insistence of its most adamant adherents, it is nutritionally inferior to a diet that includes meat, thus more effort needs to be made to get enough essential nutrients, and this is often not done correctly. Same applies to protein specifically.
But that's really getting beside the issue. The point is it's theoretically possible to remain at stable health on most diets, but it doesn't follow that humans are better off eating a variety of foods when a few particular foods have clear advantages in terms of nutrition and historical availability.
> 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 principle, I agree, though the "processed foods are bad" thing is a bit of a meme at this point. Take pretty much any non-standard diet and you'll probably find it involves fewer processed foods.
> You take out a lot of things like fiber
You don't need fiber, actually, at least when you're eating primarily meat.
> Processed foods seem to be a big driver of obesity.
Yes, though not so much that they lack fiber and more that they contain poisons and activate the Randle Cycle.
The only reason carbs are so prevalent now is because they’re cheap. Grass fed meat is healthy, fat is healthy, sugar is bad, etc. don’t believe the research, spend a few weeks eating only quality meat and veggies, nuts, fatty foods. See how you feel
Life expectancy is primarily a statistic that reflects child & early mortality, it’s the wrong metric to understand how long healthy people live. Life expectancy of all 20 year olds (people who didn’t die before that) has been more like 50 years old for thousands of years. Maximum life span, or longevity, has been around 70-80 years for as far back as we can figure. Hastily googled but decent explanation: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...
I don’t understand what you’re implying about life expectancy and macronutrients, can you elaborate? How does life expectancy (or longevity) affect macros?
The "starch heavy tubers" didn't exist in ancient times, they were mostly high fiber low starch-like food, totaly different than modern tubers like a potato.
Also: using carbon/nitrogen dating to detect what we ate goes back max 100k years, so we don't know what we ate before that based on the bones.
Honey was pretty much the only ancient high-carb food.
All modern high-starchy plants (rice, potatoes,...) are a modern "invention".
Ancient fruit also had hardly any sugar and other than berries it didn't exist in any remotely similar form that we know today.
Also using just one group that exists today (Hadza) is ridicoulous to generalize this to 100k+ years ago.
These people usually say "see, we eat high carb because of dental residue from starches" but they forget that those starches at that time were extremely low carb.
Fruit in nature is highly variable. I can't find a link to a paper that was published that showed that aboriginal fruit was on average a bit higher in sugar content than standard varieties. Here's a paper that came up in a quick search, and the main point is really that the sugar content is highly variable in nature, and some natural fruit are rich in sugar [1]
Modern breeding does not have high sugar content as it's biggest priority but often instead focuses first on the ability to grow the plant in an agricultural system, sell it in a supermarket (durable in transport, avoid spoiling), and eat it conveniently (for example remove seeds). This includes reducing toxins and bitter flavors so that fruit can be picked before it is fully ripe.
Even before cultivation, there were many fruits with high content of sugar, as can be seen today in various wild fruits.
However, where you are right is that those wild fruits were much smaller than the present-day cultivated fruits, and their energy density was low anyway, due to the high water content, so gathering a quantity large enough to provide a significant fraction of the daily intake of energy for an animal of the size of a human would have required too much time to be a frequent occurrence.
It is certain that humans have always enjoyed eating sweet wild fruits whenever they could find them, but they have never been able to survive without eating other food in much larger quantities.
I assume that the poster above has meant by "ancient times" a time before Neolithic, i.e. more than 10 thousand years ago.
Obviously, there are wild plants with starchy tubers or roots, so they must have existed before the Neolithic. However, like also the wild fruits, the starchy tubers or roots of wild plants are usually much smaller than those of cultivated plants like potatoes or sweet potatoes.
Therefore gathering enough starchy tubers or roots to feed a human would have been hard work. Nevertheless, that is still a method that is more likely to be able to provide enough food for a human, than gathering wild fruits.
More importantly, no contemporary hunter-gatherers are a good model for pre-agricultural people (to call them hunter-gatherers at that time is to imply there were other sorts of people, which there were not). The remaining people practicing such a folkway live on marginal land, the harsh truth of human existence being that if it was rich enough for agriculture, or good for pastoralism, those lifestyles would have won out.
Evidence for eating anything we could get our hands on, including quite a bit of meat, is abundant in paleoarchaeology.
What no one ate as much of is grains, specifically ground grains. We know this because, while grinding stones date back hundreds of thousands of years, the tooth wear patterns which indicate a diet primarily based on flour are not evident in remains until agriculture.
My point being that the Hadza speciality in honey-scavenging is much like the Inuit speciality in seals: it's an adaptation to circumstances which suits them, but probably doesn't teach us much about how we can eat healthy, or much about how our pre-agricultural ancestors tended to eat.