Thesis #6: Humans are still Pleistocene animals.
by Jason GodeskyIn 1833, Charles Lyell introduced the name “Holocene,” or “Recent Whole,” for our current geological epoch, stretching back only 10 or 12 thousand years. This makes the Holocene an incredibly young geological epoch, the shortest by far. The International Geological Congress in Bologna adopted the term in 1885, and it has been the accepted terminology ever since. The preceding geological epoch was the “last ice age,” the Pleistocene. It lasted for two million years, and while it was marked by significantly advanced glaciation, this was not the unremitting state of affairs. The Pleistocene had regular interglacial periods, during which the weather would turn warmer and the glaciers would temporarily recede–just like today. These interglacials typically lasted an average of 10 - 20 thousand years–just like ours. In short, the “Holocene” is not a new geological epoch, as much as we might think that the grandeur of human civilization’s appearance should be reflected in the ages of the earth. It is a perfectly typical interglacial. The Pleistocene–the “last ice age”–never ended. We’re still in it–we’re simply in a bit of a warm spell.
If anything, our current interglacial is most remarkable for its brevity. If it ended this week and the glaciers returned (and, while The Day After Tomorrow certainly pressed the point too far, these things do happen very suddenly), it would be marked as the shorter side of normal. In fact, it would have ended some 5,000 years ago–an interglacial of just 5 to 7 thousand years–were it not for the ecological devastation of the Agricultural Revolution. The first farmers were responsible for massive deforestation, and raising huge herds of livestock that polluted the atmosphere with incredible amounts of methane–enough to hold the glaciers in check. For 5,000 years, our civilization has lived on borrowed time, extending our “Holocene” by balancing the earth’s natural cooling trend against our reckless environmental abuse. The Industrial Revolution was not a change in kind, but in scale–a significant increase in our ability to harm the earth’s ecosystems, destroying all semblance of balance that our previous rampages had so precariously struck.
Amazingly, much of the reporting on Ruddiman’s findings, like the FuturePundit entry cited above, argue that this is evidence that humans should try to engineer the planet’s climate. Our agricultural civilization is utterly dependent on the peculiar climate of the Holocene interglacial, this is true. It is a unique product of that climate, and if that climate ends, so will it. In the same fashion, humans are children of the Pleistocene. It is our home, through and through. We have changed far too little in the past 10,000 years to be well-adapted to the epochal changes in our lifestyle that we have seen. We are maladapted to our cultural context. The ecological damage we have done for these past millennia have only extended this state of affairs. Civilization may not be able to survive the end of the Holocene interglacial, but humanity certainly can. We are Pleistocene animals.
The Pleistocene was preceded by the Pliocene, an epoch cooler and drier than the preceeding Miocene. Temperatures and rainfall were similar to that of today; in most regions, this meant a colder, drier climate. This was the case in Africa, where jungles shrank and grasslands took their place. Our ancestors were those primates who did not retreat with the jungle, but instead attempted to make their living in the wide, open grasslands. It was in this new challenge that our ancestors, the australopithecines, first defined themselves: by walking upright.
Habitual bipedality is unique in the order primates, though certainly not across the animal kingdom. Australopithecine anatomy shifted to accomodate a vertical, rather than horizontal, alignment. Greater height gave australopithecines the ability to see farther over the grasses, and it gave them a new mode of locomotion in walking.
Walking has unqiue advantages. It is not by any means the fastest mode of transport. Most animals can run faster than humans. However, such locomotion is supported primarily by powerful muscles. This means they tire quickly. Cheetahs can run at over 110 km/hr (70 mph), but it cannot sustain this speed for very long. Most cheetahs will stalk their prey closely, but the final chase will rarely last more than one minute. Walking is very different. Walking does not rely on muscle, but on bone. Walking is a controlled fall, which shifts the body’s weight onto the leg bones, thanks to the locked knee. This means that there is less energy involved in each individual step a bipedal human takes, compared to most quadrupedal animals. Humans may not move as quickly, but they can move more often. The result is an animal that won’t run as quickly, but at the end of the day can cover much more ground.
This tells us something about the changing diet of australopithecus. Many other apes are opportunistic scavengers, and sometimes even hunters. However, this is rarely their primary sustenance. The innovation of walking suggests that australopithecines were relying more on meat than their ancestors had.
The superpredators of Africa had created a harsh Darwinian niche for scavengers, leading to powerful packs of hyenas and flocks of vultures that could easily overpower australopithecines. Instead, australopithecines adopted a strategy of finding the kill site first, getting to it first, grabbing their meat, and retreating before other, more powerful scavengers showed up. Walking upright allowed them to see farther across the grasslands, but a kill site could be anywhere. The more ground a scavenger covers in a day, the more likely that scavenger is to stumble upon a kill site. Scavengers don’t necessarily need to be fast–the dead rarely outrun them–they just need to keep moving as long as possible and cover as large a range as possible. The larger their daily range, the higher their chances of finding a kill site. That’s precisely what walking allows for, and australopithecine anatomy was built for nothing quite so perfectly as walking.
We retain those traits even today, which is precisely what makes walking such an important activity. Thomas Jefferson remarked, “Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.” For more than 99% of our history, humans have been foragers–which meant, more than anything else, walking. While foragers work markedly less than we do, that work consisted almost exclusively of walking: up to four hours every day. The effects of the automobile in the 1950s not only gave us dating, it also destroyed our communities. Resources were no longer grouped together, as walking from place to place became impossible and automobiles became a requirement for existence. Face-to-face interaction died off, and so did the habit of walking–resulting in our current obesity crisis. This doesn’t mean that cars and dating are bad–what it means is that we now live in a context to which we are not adapted.
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Two million years ago, the Pliocene became colder and drier still, as the Pleistocene began. The last of these walking australopithecines, Australopithecus afarensis, was nearly identical to the first member of our own genus, Homo habilis, save in one, crucial regard: Homo habilis’s skull was twice the size of the australopithecus’.
Thanks mostly to anthropocentrism, our genus, Homo, suffers from what may well be the single most ridiculous defining criteria in all of science: we use tools. Of course, we have found tool use in other animals (as we touched on in thesis #3), and it is entirely likely that various australopithecines used wooden tools at least as complicated as those fashioned by modern-day chimpanzees or crows. Chimpanzees have even been observed with the rare stone tool. But the primary reason that this distinction is so laughable as a biological genus is that it is entirely behavioral, and utterly divorced from biology!
That is not to say that our tool use isn’t important. Quite the opposite. The explosion in cranial capacity that separates the two contemporary hominid genera seems quite significant. It is very clearly tied to tool use, for while australopithecines may well have fashioned any manner of wooden tools, we only find stone tools associated with Homo habilis.
The Oldowan tool set is the oldest set of technology we know of. It emerged 2.4 million years ago, as the long cooling of the Pliocene–the era of the australopithecines–gave way to the deeper cold of the Pleistocene–the era of our own genus. The making of these stone tools required changes in Homo habilis’s brain structures. We find the first evidence for handedness among these earliest members of our genus. We have also learned that handedness, tool use, and language are all linked functions in the human brain. Even if Homo habilis could not speak, the neurological foundations for it were laid with tool use.
These tools made Homo habilis a more efficient scavenger. With choppers and other stone tools, Homo habilis could butcher a dead animal more quickly, allowing them to clear out of the kill site more quickly, giving them an evolutionary edge. Yet for all its importance, the Oldowan tool kit changed little in the million years that it was used by Homo habilis and the myriad species thrown together into the waste-basket called “Homo erectus.”1 These tools made our genus a far more efficient scavenger. The greater amounts of meat this afforded provided the protein for the explosion in cranial capacity that marked the seperation of the hominid genera.
One of the various “Homo erectus” species developed the Achulean tool set; others learned how to use and control fire. Hominids became better scavengers. Now they might have used their weapons to scare off other scavengers, rather than butchering quickly and running from the site. They may have begun to prey upon that gray area ever carnivore treads. No predator will pass up a perfectly good, recent kill–and many scavengers are more than willing to finish off a wounded animal. Or, with sufficient coordination and/or weaponry, a hale and healthy animal. It was in the “Homo erectus” period that hominids transitioned from scavengers, to hunters.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, the “Man the Hunter” theory dominated thinking on this topic, explaining human evolution in terms of hunting practices. It was closely linked to thinking on “killer apes,” and a generally Hobbesian view of human nature, painting humans as inherently violent killers. It drew ire from feminists who charged that it neglected the role of females in evolution, while other researchers hoped for evidence to distance human nature from such a grim, violent picture. That theory has declined in recent years, largely due to political correctness.
The feminist critique is rather weak. Since every female has a father, any strong natural selection exerted on one gender will easily cause changes throughout the species, in both genders. Any strong natural selection exerted on women will show up in the male population, as well. There is a much stronger criticism in the analyses of forager diets showing that they rely much more on plants than animals. Richard Lee showed that foragers relied more on plant matter than meat, leading some to refer to “gatherer-hunters” rather than “hunter-gatherers.” However, critics of Lee highlighted his complete reliance on the Ju/’Hoansi, who have an atypical love affair with the mongongo nut. More cross-cultural studies2 found that forager diets correlated to latitude: foragers closer to the equator ate more plants, foragers closer to the poles ate more meat. They also found significantly more meat than Lee: near 100% for such polar extremes as the Inuit, but only 14% of forager cultures in total got even half of their diet from plants. Despite this solid refutation, much is still made of Lee’s findings. An emerging concensus supports this “gatherer-hunter” model, though nearly all arguments for it are based on political correctness.
For the opponents of the “Man the Hunter” theory, acquiescing that hunting was an important part of human evolution is to normalize and excuse violence. It rests on an idea that is very old in Hinduism and Buddhism, which has only in recent decades formed vegetarian thought in the West: the idea of meat-eating as an inherently violent act. The presumption of this argument is that violence is only violence if enacted upon animals; that one cannot by violent towards plants. There is an assumption in this that while animals are alive, plants really aren’t. This is also a very old idea. The name “animal” derives from the Latin animus or spirit, because animals are animated–moved by a spirit–while plants are not. Even in shamanic and animistic schemes, animal life is often elevated above plant life.
The underpinnings for this belief have little basis in fact. As animals, animals are closer to us, and thus enjoy some special concern from us for their proximity. At its base, this is simply one more concentric circle in the widening ripples of anthropocentrism. As Giulianna Lamanna highlighted in her article, “The Hypocrisy of Vegetarianism,” there is even some intriguing indications of the possibility that plants may even feel in some strange way. Violence against a carrot is every bit as much violence, as violence against a cow.
Yet the proponents of “Man the Hunter” have predicated it upon an inherently evil and violent human nature; its detractors have predicated it upon an inherently good and gentle human nature. Both are idealized and misguided. We do not think of other predators as evil or violent, do we? Do we conceive of lions, or sharks, or bears, or spiders in such ways? Predators are important parts of the natural world. The return of the wolves to Yellowstone restored the park’s ecology which had been thrown out of balance by the predator’s departure.
We have already seen that both views of humans as good and humans as evil are overly simplistic (thesis #5). The issue of humanity and hunting is a fine example of such an issue that cuts both ways. Tracking requires careful observation, but even that alone is insufficient. Careful observation yields only an assemblage of data points. The tracker must assemble those points into a narrative, to weave a story around that data that not only says where the animal was and what it did, but predicts where it is going, as well. The needs of the tracker provide the natural selective pressure for human cognition as we know it.
But hunting is never a sure thing. Sometimes you bag yourself a big, juicy kill, and sometimes you come home empty-handed. Skill has a lot to do with it–but so does luck. Among foragers, it’s been calculated that on any given hunt, a hunter only has a 25% chance of making a kill. Yet our ancestors not only derived most of their protein from meat, they derived most of their daily energy from meat, as well. How did they do this, if they only ate one day out of four? While the probability that one hunter will fail on a given day might be 0.75, the probability that four hunters that all go out on the same day will all fail to catch something is 0.316. In other words, if four hunters all agree to share whatever they kill between them, then there is generally a 68% chance that all four of them will eat that day–where alone, their chances drop to 25%.
The risks involved in hunting made cooperation an important human strategy. Unlike other primates, our bonds formed into small, open, cooperative, egalitarian groups. The adoption of human society to mitigate hunting risks emphasized that any hunter could be the one bringing home dinner that night, and ultimately the conviction that everyone has value to the group. Sharing evolved not as a virtue, but as a necessity. In forager groups today, sharing is not considered “nice,” it’s simply expected as a social baseline, and as a requirement for survival.
Hunting inhabits a morally ambiguous position, then. The act itself is violent, yet its risks gave us the very notion of society and its attendant virtues of sharing, cooperation, and compassion–the very same virtues vegetarians seek to promote by denying that very thing that created them. The risks of hunting instilled in our ancestors their first sense of wonder and reverence. They saw the animals they killed not as trophies as we might, but as sacrifices necessary for survival. They worshipped the animals they consumed, using the narrative cognition tracking bestowed upon them to yield the first philosophy and religion humans would ever have. As shamans charted the expanses of human consciousness, art, music and science followed. The first hominids made their lives as communal scavengers, but as they learned to hunt, they became human.
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But man does not live by meat alone, but by every nut, berry, tuber and leafy green that comes from the hand of woman. While the supposition that foragers were “gatherer-hunters” is little more than political correctness projecting itself back into our evolutionary history, neither can we ignore the importance of gathered foodstuffs. Foragers did divide labor roughly along gender lines, with males usually taking up most of the hunting, for obvious, biological reasons. Even though it was hunting that provided not only the protein our bodies required, but also most of the energy we used, it would be a mistake to discount the role of women.
Besides energy and protein, our bodies require smaller amounts of vital micronutrients. We do not need them in large quantities, but we do very much need them. Without sufficient vitamin A, children go blind. Insufficient vitamin D leads to rickets. If you don’t get enough vitamin C, you’ll come down with a case of scurvy. Wild edible plants provided these in abundances our modern domesticates cannot hope to match. Two cups of dandelion leaves contain more vitamin C than four glasses of orange juice; dandelions have more beta carotine than carrots, and more potassium than potatoes or spinach–alongside healthy doses of iron and copper. You’ll find wild edibles replete with quantities of vitamins, minerals, omega 3 fatty acids and all manner of other nutrients that float in our public consciousness precisely because our modern diet so clearly lacks them.
The line between food and medicine was not so clear, either. Common, broadleaf plantain is, along with dandelion, probably one of the most nutritious plant in the world, but plantain is also a powerful pain-killer, as well as having anti-toxic, anti-microbial, and anti-inflammatory properties. When ingested, it is a demulcent, a diuretic, and an expectorant. By the same token, dandelions can be used as a general tonic that helps strengthen the liver, gall bladder, pancreas, spleen, stomach, and intestines. They improve bile flow and reduce inflammation in cases of hepatitis and cirrhosis.
Women did not simply gather side dishes crucial to nutrition and survival; they provided medicines that not only cured sickness, but improved health, as well. Where male hunters cultivated spacial perception and risk-sharing strategies, could it have been the needs of female gatherers that gave us much of our abilities for memory and memorization?
* * *
As Paleolithic foragers, humans were beginnning to develop a new strategy to survive the Pleistocene. Many animals learn a great deal, and use this to supplement their instincts. Orangutans have identifiable cultures, and similar observations have been made of chimpanzees. Humans took this to an extreme, with very few inborn instincts. Instead, our brain became hard-wired not for any specific behavior set, but for recieving culture. In the acculturation process, we learn the rules and taboos of the culture we are born into, and incorporate them on a very deep level. Things that disgust us, for example–particularly food and sex taboos–are usually very arbitrary, yet we feel them so deeply that they are often mistaken for natural, universal truths.
We might think of this innovation in similar terms to the early history of computing. Early computers, or Turing machines, were made to perform a specific task. The innovations of von Neumann, Simon and others led to computers that were made to run arbitrary programs. Most animals have a much larger repository of instincts than we do, and learn much less. This leads to species-wide behavior patterns. Humans, on the other hand, owe much more of their behavior to culture than instinct. This means that culture can provide another layer of adaptation that can change much more quickly than evolution. It gives humans a competitive edge, by allowing us to adapt to any new environment with incredible speed and ease. When combined with our omnivorism opening a much wider array of possible foods, humans have thus become very possibly the most adaptable species on the planet.
Most animals, when confronted by fire, have a natural instinct to run away. At some point, long ago in our history, that instinct was stalled by our acculturation, and rather than run from it, some human actually went towards it, and brought it back under her own control. In time, we even learned how to start our own fires, yet the turning point of that first human to run towards the fire remains one of the most pivotal moments in our history. The Greeks immortalized that event in the myth of Prometheus, and the mythology of the San point to it as the turning point of our species:
Kaang gathered all the people and animals about him. He instructed them to live together peacefully. Then he turned to the men and women and warned them not to build any fires or a great evil would befall them. They gave their word and Kaang left to where he could watch his world secretly.
As evening approached the sun began to sink beneath the horizon. The people and animals stood watching this phenomenon, but when the sun disappeared fear entered the hearts of the people. They could no longer see each other as they lacked the eyes of the animals which were capable of seeing in the dark. They lacked the warm fur of the animals also and soon grew cold. In desperation one man suggested that they build a fire to keep warm. Forgetting Kaang’s warning they disobeyed him. They soon grew warm and were once again able to see each other.
However the fire frightened the animals. They fled to the caves and mountains and ever since the people broke Kaang’s command people have not been able to communicate with animals. Now fear has replaced the seat friendship once held between the two groups.
Humans spread out of Africa, into Asia and Europe. The ice age lowered the water levels, revealing the Bering Land Bridge, which humans followed into the Americas. The lower water levels made the islands of Indonesia and Micronesia larger, and the water between them smaller. Humans hopped from island to island in ancient canoes, until eventually they reached Australia. In these new environments, humans often relied more heavily on meat, at least at first, as they learned the new flora of these strange lands, what was safe to eat, and what was poisonous.
Until recently, the term “Holocene Extinction” referred to a rather minor spate of extinction which took place at the beginning of the Holocene, with the end of the megafauna–woolly mammoths, North American horses, sabertooth cats, and other large mammals. This occured at the beginning of the Holocene, as humans were first moving into many new environments, like the Americas and Australia. This has led to a long-standing debate between “overkill” and “overchill.” Were the megafauna wiped out by climate change? Or by rapacious, brutal bands of overhunting human foragers? Both sides have their evidence, of course.
Nor is this merely an academic argument without reprecussion for the present. The “overkill” theory is routinely cited by some groups as if it were already a proven fact, and used as evidence that humans are an inherently destructive species. So we needn’t worry ourselves with the environmental destruction we wreak. We can’t help it. It’s our nature.
As you might expect, the truth lies somewhere between overkill and overchill. Human populations were almost certainly too small to wreak such havok all by themselves, and the same climate changes that opened the way for humans into Australia and the Americas also had to affect the other large mammals living across the globe. Even more instructive, however, is the modern case of the wolves of Yellowstone. Alpha predators–like wolves, and like humans–play important, keystone roles in any ecology. The introduction of a new alpha predator can have dramatic effects, even causing cascades of extinction. This is not necessarily because the alpha predators overhunt or are even in the least bit maladaptive; this is simply the nature of alpha predators and how they relate in any given ecology. When humans came to Australia and the Americas, they were as harmless as wolves, lions, or any other big mammalian predator. Their presence caused cascades of changes throughout the ecosystem. Given that it was also a period of major climate change, a great number of species that were already under stress adapting to the new climate were tipped over the edge into extinction by the further ecological changes created by the adaptation of a new alpha predator. Our ancestors were hardly noble savages; but neither were they bloodthirsty killers bent on the destruction of all life on earth. They were animals, like any other.
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In the Upper Paleolithic, we see a “revolution” leading to what paleoanthropologists sometimes refer to as “behavioral modernity.” There is a good deal of misinformation all around on this point, so let me first address this concept of “modernity.” Like the waste-basket of Homo erectus, paleoanthropologists have shoe-horned many different species into the category of “anatomically modern Homo sapiens” not based on fossil evidence, but because of their age. The alternative would be to recognize that human evolution was not a process of unilineal evolution–that it was not a tree, but a “bush.” Though this conclusion has become inescapable to most paleoanthropologists today, the categorizations of their predecessors who were not so enlightened often remain.
This has led to some startlement among paleoanthropologists, as we see “anatomically modern” humans, but without evincing any sign of the things we define ourselves by: art, religion, philosophy, etc. So, many have split “modernity” into anatomical and behavioral aspects. This is a false dilemna born not only of the rough shoe-horning of evidence already discussed, but also of the “revolution” idea born of Eurocentrism.
In Europe, the Upper Paleolithic truly is a “revolution.” We have cave art, sculptures, musical instruments, evidence of arithmetic and astronomy all appearing at once. This led many paleoanthropologists to think that “modern behavior” was a package deal, that there was some kind of genetic switch that allowed them all to fllower at once.
In Africa, however, we see each of these various elements accrue over time. They do not appear all at once, as in Europe. The conclusion is simple, and straightforward: “behaviorally modern” humans came out of Africa. This is the same “out of Africa” hypothesis that has won almost unanimous support over the multiregional hypothesis that has so long been the bulwark of racists and pseudo-scientists. If we look only at the European evidence, then, we have a “revolution”–but only because these new, African tribes arrived at a given time, practicing all of their culture at once.
Yet, all of these cultural phenomena that we define ourselves by do have a common origin, in shamanism. David Lewis-Williams is at his most convincing when he shows the underpinnings of shamanism in human neurology and psychology, and how rock art is an expression of that. Michael Winkelman has written a great deal on the evolutionary adaptations of shamanism. Both show how important shamanism was as an adaptation to the Pleistocene environment we evolved in, not only to reconcile the workings of our inner worlds to the world we live in, but also as a touchstone of community life and social function, an integrative function for the psychologically aberrant, and a healing function for the individual and the community.
Shamans most often induced altered states of consciousness through repetitive sound and motion–song and dance. Their visions provided the philosophy and world-view of their tribes, giving rise to the first religion and philosophy. Often, shamanic rituals were tied to the motions of the celestial bodies–and the first evidence we have of arithmetic is a “counting stick” cut off in sets of 28, most likely tracking the phases of the moon. Shamans were ethnobotanists of the highest order, and were willing to experiment even with the spirit world, so in some sense, we might even trace the first glimmerings of science to them, as well. “Behavioral modernity” goes back to the Upper Paleolithic, a gift from the shaman, and that unique adaptation to the Pleistocene that first tried to map the universe in our own minds.
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The Pleistocene lasted for two million years–the same two million years that saw the rise of our genus. Like all animals, we are products of evolution, adapted to a specific niche. Our niche was the Pleistocene. The Holocene has been far too short for any significant amount of adaptation to occur, and how maladapted we are to our current lifestyle should be obvious. The effects of not walking as often on our health has already been touched upon. The loss of the shaman’s role has led to the marginalization of people once well integrated into society, and the loss of tribal society has been catastrophic in other ways which we will explore in future theses. For the moment, I would like to turn to just one arena in which the Holocene has proven the bane of our species: health.
The Agricultural Revolution was a massive change in diet. Where once we had gained the majority of our energy from animal proteins, and our food came from hundreds of different species, the Neolithic saw an utter reliance on less than a dozen different species, with the majority of our energy now coming from carbohydrates. Even today, more than 50% of the American diet comes from just three plants–wheat, rice and potatoes.
Ben Balzer’s introduction to the “Paleolithic Diet” provides a great deal of wonderful information on the nutritional deficits that agriculture has given us, but for now I will simply quote his analysis of grains:
These advantages made it much easier to store and transport food. We could more easily store food for winter, and for nomads and travelers to carry supplies. Food storage also enabled surpluses to be stored, and this in turn made it possible to free some people from food gathering to become specialists in other activities, such as builders, warriors and rulers. This in turn set us on the course to modern day civilization. Despite these advantages, our genes were never developed with grains, beans and potatoes and were not in tune with them, and still are not. Man soon improved further on these advances- by farming plants and animals.
As Belzar points out, grains are powerful packets of energy. The plants wrap their seeds in carbohydrates, to give them the energy to grow. Co-evolution has struck a balance between the needs of plants and animals: animals eat seeds and fruits, and in return, they help spread the seeds. Key here, from the plant’s point of view, is that the seed not be destroyed, or else its part of the deal has been eliminated. Animals adapted to certain plant types will be able to gain nutrition from the wrapping around the seed, and those plants will generally not become toxic to those animals (or else their seeds won’t travel very far). However, the seed itself is often quite toxic, to make sure the animals don’t eat them.
Humans are very well adapted to eating any number of such fruits, nuts and so forth. Grains, however, are not on that list. Hominids have experimented with eating grains in the past. The only hominids ever adapted to that diet were the genus Paranthropus, once classified as the “robust” branch of the Australopithecines. These are, at best, distantly related great-uncles to our own species. We are not descended from them, and have not inherited the various enzymes and chemicals they required to make use of grains.
Grains are quite toxic when eaten raw, but cooking can render them edible. Even then, they are of substantially lower nutritional quality than almost any other edible plant. They contain little more than carbohydrates–an energy source our body can surely make use of, but it is not our bodies’ favored source of energy. We are better adapted to the use of protein for energy. Grains also include a number of “anti-nutrients,” such as lectins, which can have as wide-spread an effect through the body as hormones, but because they are foreign (and maladapted) to the human body, cause effects that are unpredictable and often deleterious. It may well be because of lectins that the first study of correlative cancer causes, performed by Stanislaw Tanchou in 1843, remains the most accurate. This page from paleodiet.com reviews much of the evidence for grains’ implication in cancer. It includes:
Stanislaw Tanchou “….gave the first formula for predicting cancer risk. It was based on grain consumption and was found to accurately calculate cancer rates in major European cities. The more grain consumed, the greater the rate of cancer.” Tanchou’s paper was delivered to the Paris Medical Society in 1843. He also postulated that cancer would likewise never be found in hunter-gatherer populations. This began a search among the populations of hunter-gatherers known to missionary doctors and explorers. This search continued until WWII when the last wild humans were “civilized” in the Arctic and Australia. No cases of cancer were ever found within these populations, although after they adopted the diet of civilization, it became common.
The mechanism is not difficult to imagine. Cancer cells appear in every healthy human body with some frequency, but the immune system idenfities them as foreign and destroys them. Lectins–and generally poor nutrition–suppress the immune response, allowing more cancer cells to survive and become tumors.
Grains, beans and potatoes also have many enzyme blockers that shut down significant parts of the human digestive system. The most common type are protease inhibitors, which block the enzyme protease, which is required in the digestion of protein. Most of these are broken down in cooking, but not all.
Beyond the negative health effects of these “Neolithic foods,” they are incredibly poor in the various other nutrients humans need, which were provided in abundance by our forager lifestyle. This is the very reason that humans in industrialized societies so often need dietary and vitamin supplements–our diet does not provide the nutrition we need, the nutrition our bodies evolved to expect.
Why then is bread called “the staff of life”? Simply because it is a staple food. Eaten in sufficient quantities, it can keep us alive–as it has kept generations of civilized people alive. It will keep us alive, for a short, sickly life. The finds at Dickson’s Mounds showed the effects of agriculture. The literal children of six foot tall foragers that lived into their 60s or 70s with perfect health, would die of malnutrition or disease in their 20s or 30s, barely reaching five feet. The concentrated populations, proximity to animals (allowing germs to jump the species barrier), and heavy trade of agricultural life allowed for the rise of disease as we know it–this was one of Jared Diamond’s main points in his indictment of agriculture as “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” But malnutrition and starvation also became fixtures of human life then. As a general rule, only farmers ever starve.
Realizing this, some have now started calling bread “the staff of death.” Steve Brill calls the average American “overfed and malnourished,” an idea that evokes the scientific idea of “affluent malnutrition.” We maintain our lives–and even our obesity–by eating enormous quantities, but what we eat is so nutritionally bankrupt that even then we are only barely getting the basic requirements for survival.
Our civilization does need the Holocene. The grains it is so utterly dependent on are tempermental crops that can only tolerate the most minute climatic fluctuations. Humans, however, are animals of the Pleistocene. The Pleistocene was our home, it is what we are adapted to. The short 10 millennia of the Holocene has not given us sufficient time to adapt to our modern lives. Those lives are very nearly contradictions of the environment we evolved in: hierarchical, rather than egalitarian; carbohydrate-based, rather than protein-based; sedentary, rather than nomadic; plant-based, rather than animal-based; specialized, rather than generalized; regimented, rather than free-form; marginalized, rather than integrated. It is the very definition of dehumanizing.
There is a glimmer of hope, though. The Holocene is not the geological epoch we glorified it as. It is merely an interglacial; an interglacial due to end any time now. The Pleistocene will return. It’s almost time to go home.
Footnotes
1 At the University of Pittsburgh, I had the great fortune to take one of Dr. Jeffrey H. Schwartz’s workshop courses, where we had the opportunity to examine many specimens of H. erectus closely. Schwartz demonstrated to my satisfaction that H. erectus is, in fact, at least a dozen distinct human species. Why, then, have they been lumped together? As Schwartz was quoted by the BBC, “Palaeoanthropologists often have this assumption that every hominid found from that time period is a H. erectus. They group hominids not on the basis of what they look like, but the time when they lived, which is totally unfounded. There is a tradition of confusing diversity with variation.” So, the myth of “evolution as progress,” as discussed and dismissed in thesis #2, led paleoanthropologists to divide human evolution into stages in a story of progress to our final, ideal form. Then, fossils were fit into a given stage not because of morphological differences, but based on their dating and how they would fit into our progression. In fact, as we know, evolution engenders diversity, not progress–so the more complicated, diverse history laid out by the actual fossil evidence is far more realistic than the picture of lineal progress painted previously. [ Back ]
2 Cordain, et al, 2000. “Plant-Animal Subsistence Ratios and Macronutrient Energy Estimations in Worldwide Hunter-Gatherer Diets” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 71:682-692[ Back ]
Yes, I know, that was way too long between theses … but hopefully the wait was worth it.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 August 2005 @ 1:28 PM
Excellent stuff. Just as an add-on, scientists now believe that bipedalism arrives just about 6 million years ago:
Article from National Geographic
From a program I was watching, they hypothesized that the initial bipedalism was a evolutionary variant set up to help us get from tree to tree by going to the ground and walking. When the forests began to shrink, it was a defining trait that helped us adapt to savannah life while other forest dwellers were forced to retreat - a nice example of survival of the luckiest, I guess.
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 27 August 2005 @ 4:07 PM
Definitely agree with this one. Evolution is way too slow to have chaged us whilst civilised/domesticated. And civilisation doesnt really apply (psycological) selection pressures anyway.
Comment by Slothboy — 2 March 2006 @ 4:56 PM
The only thing about returning to the Pleistocene is, how will that be affected by global warming?
Comment by Thomas Rondy — 22 August 2006 @ 2:03 PM
Slothboy:
I do sometimes wonder if our tendency to have so many people innately predisposed to being overweight is because civilization has exerted its unique brand of selection pressure.
It’s well-known that agricultural civilizations tend to experience cycles of feast and famine, and that in the Middle Ages, peasants would fatten themselves up during the feast periods in order to survive the famine periods. Therefore, those more likely to succeed in this approach were those with a built-in tendency to put on extra fat-weight.
Comment by Thomas Rondy — 22 August 2006 @ 2:07 PM
Hey Jason,
What happened to all the othere homos?
Did they all fuck each other into a monogenetic state (either sexually or violently)?
Comment by MatthewJ — 22 August 2006 @ 2:20 PM
Anybody’s guess at the moment; my guess is on the end of the Pleistocene entirely, and a whole new climatological epoch, the likes of which Homo sapiens has never before seen. I have faith in our ability to survive it, though; we grew up in the Darwinian hell that is the Africa of the super-predators. The equator may become too hot for us, but if it gets so hot that the poles get hotter than Africa is now, it’s endgame for all life on the planet anyway, and I don’t see that happening.
That’s the million dollar question, innit? I think, ultimately, the niche for such an alpha predator, omnivore simian is a pretty small one, and the better Homo sapiens became at exploiting it, the less the rest of the genus could keep up.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 August 2006 @ 2:25 PM
This is a great piece of writing. My only issue with it is that you use the term “gender” when you really, in many cases, seem to mean “sex.” Most experts now agree that sex and gender are two different things. Sex, of course, is biological. Gender is a social contruct and is mental. Yes, most cultures have them closely aligning, but that is a matter of being taught to act a certain way and to relate to a certain group and not necessarily biological in nature like sex. While there are biological differences in relation to behavior and ability in the sexes, these differences are much smaller than most people think. Also, since gender is taught, not everyone will feel that their sex and assigned gender are what the group says they should be. Most cultures allowed for this variation in gender, which was often more important than sex. But that also means that many cultures had more than our bianary system of sex and gender, allowed for more fluidity, and did not as often base things on the rigid roles we do today. There were roles, but they were adaptable.
Comment by Xendara — 18 October 2006 @ 8:18 AM
I’m quite aware of the difference between sex and gender, and for the most part, I’ve used them precisely. For instance:
There’s a nuance hidden away in there: there is such a thing as a female hunter in forager groups, namely, the woman with a male gender. The division of labor is along gender lines, even if it isn’t necessarily along sex lines. Foragers will often have third, fourth, and even fifth genders. The berdache for instance are males with a female gender. It would be easier to list the Native American cultures that don’t have a “Two Spirit” than those that do.
But you did catch me in some sloppy usage here:
That honestly should be sex. Sorry about that one; ya got me there.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 October 2006 @ 9:18 AM
Hey Jason- the link to Guiliana’s ‘Hypocrisy of Vegetarianism’ is broken. What’s up with that?
Comment by Rob Archangel — 1 November 2006 @ 8:25 AM
Giuli is incredibly, unbelievably, cripplingly self-conscious. The “Hypocrisy of Vegetarianism” made reference to the Backster effect, which she later investigated further and concluded was complete B.S. I pleaded, begged, and cajoled her to write an update to tell everyone what she’d learned, but she was apparently humiliated by the fact that she’s curious, learns, and is willing to change her opinions based on new facts, so instead of writing an update, she demanded that I instead delete her article—which I referenced here because it was one of the best articles this site’s ever seen. Rather the same way she pulled her brilliant novel, Words Like Weeds, out of the same crippling self-consciousness and her overwhelming shame for precisely the things she does best.
I mention all this because anything positive I tell her is automatically false, and it’s NaNoWriMo now, and she’s taking another tilt at “The Book,” so I could certainly use the public leverage to encourage her and convince her that I’m not just showering empty praise.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 November 2006 @ 9:22 AM
Jason - Great stuff that you have here. A question though: I have for quite a time now eaten an entirely raw, vegan diet. I do not do so for philosophical reasons. Rather, I find the health benefits to be extraordinary. My diet breaks down, generally, as about 1/3 leafy greens, 1/3 vegetable fats (olives, avocados, etc.), and 1/3 seeded fruits. Now, I am aware that perhaps the reason I feel so good is because I ate a normal, American diet (devoid of nutrients) prior to this, and by comparison eating rocks might make one feel better. However, when I incorporate something like raw fish into my diet, readily available at Japanese restaurants, I find the health “high” I am enjoying to suffer.
Many people ask where my protein is derived from, then, and I do eat a fair share of protein-heavy seeds and nuts, but more than anything, I eat a lot of leafy greens. There is some speculation within the raw vegan community that man may, like some other species of ape, synthesize protein via the myriad nutrients contained in leafy greens. The mountain gorilla is often cited as an example of this, for it is most certainly a “raw vegan” ape that is bound with incredible muscle. Closer to our genetic foundation, however, chimpanzees derive almost all of their nutrients from plant products, the small remaining precentage apparently coming from a species of small monkey that they hunt.
So, my questions (and hopeful discussion starters) are 1) Is it possible that man’s large brain size, which meat consumption is often credited with spurring, could have been facilitated by a mostly vegetarian diet, at least in the earlier, equatorial stage of human development? and 2) Is it possible that man, as hunter-gatherer, could survive at peak health with a purely raw, vegan diet?
My personal response to the second question (the first one is outside the realm of my scientific knowledge) is yes, I think man would, in fact, achieve ideal health through this diet. The main drawback is the question of availability of vegetable diversity. As you have stated, what we now consider weeds, such as dandelion greens, are actually excellent sources of nutrients and are abundant and fast growing likely even beyond man’s ability to consume them. However, fruits and vegetable fats are more difficult to run across, especially for an even moderately sized population, and might possible require agriculure, which, as you again have stated, is a step in the wrong direction (I agree with you, philosophically at least, on that one).
It is good to hear open, lucid discussion on these greatly important, often ignored matters. Thanks for the forum.
Comment by Dana — 21 January 2007 @ 5:39 AM
This isn’t true. Chimpanzees hunt a good deal, and derive quite a bit of their protein from hunting not one, but several species of monkeys.
Anything’s possible, of course, but this raises a great many more questions than it answers. Since chimps do hunt so much of their diet, and modern humans, even in equatorial regions, still prefer to get most of their diet from animal sources even when given the choice (Cordain et. al 2000 [PDF]), how do we explain the interrim of vegetarianism? Moreover, we have no evidence of the kind of synthesizing of proteins from plant sources in chimpanzees or humans—so where did the protein to make the bigger brain come from? And finally, we also find larger deposits of animal bones near Homo settlements with their bigger brains made out of protein, and evidence of hunting tools. What were these tools and bones used for, if they were not being eaten? The evidence points very clearly to humans hunting for the majority of their diet in a forager context, and bigger brains developing as a result of the shift from scavenging to outright hunting. To explain this in vegetarian terms is an incredible challenge.
Again, anything possible, but once more you’ve got quite a challenge on your hands. While there are hunter-gatherers that subsist on an almost purely animal diet (mostly circum-polar foragers, like the Inuit), even the most vegetable-loving foragers (near the equator) prefer animal sources. There is no equal-and-opposite to the Inuit: while there are foragers that live solely off of meat, there are no purely vegetarian foragers. All vegetarians are agriculturalists.
So, it’s possible, but if it’s true that vegetarianism leads to “peak health,” you’ll need to explain why no forager group has ever done it before.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 January 2007 @ 11:44 AM
Jason, where did you get the info that meat represents a significant portion of chimps’ diet? I’ve never come across such info; it’s been my understanding that meat represents only a minuscule portion of their diet. It’s possible that I’ve been misled of course, but I’d definitely want to see some references to the contrary.
And concerning humans. See, my personal view of the matter is that, whether or not a vegetarian/vegan diet makes sense in a forager context, it makes a lot of sense in the civilized context, especially our present (industrial) context. Partly for moral/philosophical reasons (I have issues with domestication, factory farms being the most egregious forms thereof). But partly also for health reasons: our total environment is so polluted by now that ‘clean food’ is virtually impossible to find, and toxins generally accumulate more easily in animal fats than they do in plants (my guess is that this is why cancers of all sorts have been linked to high meat consumption in the past few decades). If you can afford to eat organic meat, you’ll fare better of course, but even so, our total environment being as polluted as it is, it’s still not the same as what our ancestors ate until, well, even just recently (a hundred years ago, say).
Comment by Hasha — 22 January 2007 @ 1:37 PM
That was the old view. Since Goodall, we’ve really seen a lot of evidence for significant carnivorism in chimps, even most of their diet.
As for health reasons, a protest against factory farming is something I can easily respect, but there’s an enormous amount of toxins getting into the plant foods in agricultural practice, as well. My biggest problem with vegetarianism is that it’s a very agricultural diet, and it makes an eventual shift to permaculture or hunting and gathering much more difficult when you reach that point, either of which would provide enormous health benefits over even the “purest” vegetarian diet.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 January 2007 @ 1:42 PM
[quote]Since Goodall, we’ve really seen a lot of evidence for significant carnivorism in chimps, even most of their diet.[/quote]
You’re still not giving me any sources… I’m sceptical.
[quote]there’s an enormous amount of toxins getting into the plant foods in agricultural practice[/quote]
Oh, absolutely. But the lower you eat on the food chain, the fewer toxins you get exposed to.
[quote]. My biggest problem with vegetarianism is that it’s a very agricultural diet, and it makes an eventual shift to permaculture or hunting and gathering much more difficult when you reach that point [/quote]
Why would it make a shift to permaculture more difficult? Does permaculture require domestic animals?
Comment by Hasha — 22 January 2007 @ 2:03 PM
Well, a brief web search yields these:
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/24543?fulltext=true
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~stanford/chimphunt.html
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15042174
Not necessarily; the higher up the food chain, the more the toxins have been processed and purged. This is why carnivores have shorter digestive tracts than vegetarians: meat is easier to digest.
No, but it does require some amount of hunting, and introducing meat again to a vegetarian is not always easy.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 January 2007 @ 2:46 PM
While it might be possible for an adult human to live healthily on a Vegan diet I suspect that such a diet would hinder development in a child or adolescent.
Anecdotally, my cousin was raised vegetarian and once he became an adult, left home and started eating meat he grew significantly ( > 6 inches).
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 22 January 2007 @ 3:29 PM
[quote] Not necessarily; the higher up the food chain, the more the toxins have been processed and purged. This is why carnivores have shorter digestive tracts than vegetarians: meat is easier to digest. [/quote]
Oh, come on. I mean, it isn’t impossible that some toxins get purged that way, but in general… Otherwise, how could you explain the connection between the consumption of animal fat and cancer? Arguably, it isn’t the fat in and of itself (because then hunter-gatherers would hardly be cancer-free), so it must be something that winds up in animal fats when animals are raised in this kind of environment. As for short digestive tracts… Well yes, meat is easier to digest, but that’s because it has no cellulose and such; but cellulose is not toxic.
Anyway, I’ll look at your chimp links. As for hunting and permaculture… Why do you think it requires hunting? Impossible to get enough calories otherwise?…
[quote]Anecdotally, my cousin was raised vegetarian and once he became an adult, left home and started eating meat he grew significantly ( > 6 inches).[/quote]
Anecdotally, people have raised kids vegan, and those kids virtually never got sick, had no allergies… People argue about what the optimal diet for humans is; I figure there are lots of healthful diets, and a well-planned vegan diet is one of them. If I were to have kids, I’d raise them vegan. But… I’m not going to have kids - 6.5 billion humans is way too much as it is. But you never know, I might adopt…
Comment by Hasha — 22 January 2007 @ 3:50 PM
[quote]No, but it does require some amount of hunting, and introducing meat again to a vegetarian is not always easy.
[/quote]
You know, I’d always heard that, and was kind of scared of ‘falling off the wagon’ so to speak because of it, but when I started eating meat again, I didn’t have any ill side-effects. I wasn’t a vegan tho’, I still consumed eggs & dairy, so that probably accounts for it.
Comment by jhereg — 22 January 2007 @ 3:56 PM
Firstly, the link between animal fat and cancer isn’t quite so clear-cut. But, it is true that some chemicals do get stored in animal fat. For instance, it seems that it is POP’s stored in animal fat, not a fatty diet itself, that leads to diabetes. But it’s not a general rule that toxins are stored in animal fat. Some specific toxins are stored in animal fat.
On the other hand, there are unique means by which plants can convey various toxins into your system. For example, tobacco picks up radioactive Polonium 210 from nitrogen fertilizers (the same substance used to kill the Russian spy in London a few months back), hence the carcinogenic effects of smoking.
So you can’t generalize to say that eating lower on the food chain is healthier. At each level, there are unique means of carrying the toxins involved in industrial agriculture into your body. There’s simply no escaping that without leaving behind the entire industrial agricultural complex.
Again, if this were the case, why, in two million years, did no forager group ever try it—even when it was obviously advantageous to do so?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 January 2007 @ 4:06 PM
Well, yeah, if you’re going to eat tobacco, I suppose so… Nevertheless, fact is, under the current circumstances, vegans are less likely to suffer from cancer. As for hunter-gatherers… Look, I have no intention whatsoever of telling hunter-gatherers what they’re supposed to eat. I’m looking at our current options. Is a well-planned vegan diet that a civilized person can eat under the current circumstances healthier than a traditional hunter-gatherer diet? Well, I imagine not, if for no other reason, then because the food that hunter-gatherers ate was not exposed to the pile of chemicals that the food that we eat (even if we eat organic) is exposed to. But such a diet is simply not an option for me! What I’m suggesting is that, if I am to go to a supermarket (or a farmers’ market) with the intention of keeping myself healthy… I’d say that, as a general rule, it’s not a bad idea to eat low on the food chain. Of course, there are exceptions. (Organic) chicken is healthier than high fructose corn syrup, for example. And margarine is no better (possibly worse) than butter. But generally speaking…
Comment by Hasha — 22 January 2007 @ 8:42 PM
You know, when I said a well-planned vegan diet is healthful… I think we’re working with different standards for healthful. If you want to eat an optimal diet for a human, well, I’d say we’ve screwed up our environment so badly that it’s essentially impossible. Even for people living more or less traditionally (think about fish and mercury). But it is possible, even under the current (granted, unfavorable) circumstances to eat in a way that will allow you to live a long, basically healthy life (well, if we forget for a moment about the imminent collapse, that is). And I’m saying that one of the ways to do so is to eat a well-planned vegan diet.
Comment by Hasha — 22 January 2007 @ 8:57 PM
Your argument is compelling. The scientific evidence that man is meant to eat both plant and animal foods is overwhelming. One look at our teeth should be enough to convince. Yet the fact remains that I feel physically vibrant when I eat only uncooked vegetarian foods (no bread, no beans, and, obviously, no meat). I gain muscle mass when I eat a diet rich in greens and non-sweet fruits like tomatoes and cucumbers. Every time I eat meat or cooked vegetables this “high” is brought down. My reactions slow. My cognitive abilities falter. I don’t really have an argument here because I have no scientific ground to stand on. I don’t know why forager groups have never subsisted purely on a vegetarian diet. I suppose, when you are in a survival situation, if you see a densely rich food source like meat you will want to take it. I’m not saying I wouldn’t eat meat (as I stated, I have no philosophical bend to my diet), I just wouldn’t eat it unless it were the only source, or the best source, of nutrients available.
Also, regarding the Inuit, my understanding of them is as a short-lived, relatively unhealthy people. They seem to die younger than most other “races” of men and, from what I can recall, rarely are able to keep the majority of their teeth as they age (Please correct me if I’m misinformed here. You’re the anthropologist, after all.). While there are no raw vegan forager groups, the raw vegans I have known in my life are all in the most amazing, utmost health. Most remain powerfully athletic into their late 50’s, though, admittedly, the raw vegans I have met in that age range number less than 10. I wouldn’t call it a popular dietary style, though one wonders why after they meet, in person, some of these people.
So, and I realize that this is a dastardly act, I wonder if I might turn the question back to you. Can you think of specific areas in which the human body would be lacking on a diet that is bereft of meat? Do certain nutrients that exist in animal form [i]not[/i] exist in plant form? Regarding the B vitamin argument that regularly crops up, I believe it has been proven that overly adequate supplies of Vitamin B can be derived from eating unwashed plant products, as they are consistently covered in numbers of minute insects and in dustings of soil, both of which are rich in the B vitamin family. I don’t have handy proof of this available, but can hunt it down if you are interested.
This discussion leads me to thinking of another issue though: How do you feel about the use of fire for cooking? Surely, the human body did not evolve to eat cooked foods. If we had been intended to eat cooked products, would we not have grown microwaves on our hips (or something equally ludicrous)? As I said, I [i]would[/i] eat meat, but I would refrain from cooked meat unless it was a last resort. I will have to rely on your knowledge of contemporary forager groups, but do any of them eat meat without cooking it? You state that we have had little chance to really change since our Pleistocene emergence, and if that is the case, then surely no ability to properly digest cooked food has developed since then. Yet, at least as far as I know, no forager groups exist that refrain from cooking their food. This does not make sense to me. Unless some argument can be made that we’ve evolved to eat cooked food, which seems a difficult one to proposition, then all of humanity has willfully engaged, generation upon generation, in an act that is not in their best health interests.
Again, tone is difficult to ascertain via text and I want to assure you that this isn’t an attack on your position (which, in fact, I find myself almost entirely in agreeance with). I really like what you have to say; I’m just getting stuck on this one point.
Comment by Dana — 23 January 2007 @ 5:32 AM
Whoops. Inbetween writing and publishing that last post, a lot of new ones cropped up! My post (above) is directed at Jason’s #13. In regard to some of the other issues brought up, though, I have little doubt that a standard vegetarian or vegan diet would stunt the growth of a child. These diets include bread (which Jason has, in prior theses, shown to be a toxic form of food) and all manner of cooked vegetables. Cooked foods are significantly lower in nutrients and are harder to digest. This latter issue is likely due to the fact that many of the enzymes contained therein, which aid the body in digesting the product, are destroyed by heat. Now, I have seen children raised entirely on a [i]raw[/i] vegan diet and they are a different story. They are regularly some of the most physically robust children I have seen, though, admittedly, it isn’t hard to appear strong amidst the fields of overweight, diseased children that the American dietary system is producing.
I am not convinced that meat is easier to digest that plant products. My personal experience has shown the opposite to be true. This, of course, is in reference to raw plant foods only. Also, what kind of knowledge would you derive from the fact that it is “hard” to reintroduce meat to vegetarians? Is the opposite true? Not in my experience. This, to me at least, would suggest a human that has been exposed to a purely vegetable diet has a hard time returning to meat because he has to [i]adapt[/i] to eating it, thus revealing it as food source that he is not best suited to eat in large quantities.
Regarding cancer, my aunt used a raw vegan diet to cure herself of a moderatly virulent form of cancer that doctors told her was going to require excessive chemotherapy. She is the one who got me started on this whole thing! My own research into it has shown that the raw vegan diet is utterly free of cancer. Moreover, it has been recorded as curing thousands of people with cancer without any modern medical procedures whatsoever. I do not think any diets that involve the consumption of meat can make a similar argument.
Dammit! Why HAVEN’T forager groups eaten this way? You’re going to shoot me down here Jason, so get on with it already.
Comment by Dana — 23 January 2007 @ 5:50 AM
[quote]Dammit! Why HAVEN’T forager groups eaten this way? You’re going to shoot me down here Jason, so get on with it already. [/quote]
It isn’t impossible that it’s more cost-effective to eat an omnivorous diet. That, in the forager context, it takes less time/energy to catch an animal than it is to gather enough plants to give you the equivalent amount of calories/protein/etc. But this is, of course, just speculation.
Comment by Hasha — 23 January 2007 @ 2:19 PM
Another thought! Eating meat would increase the carrying capacity for our species. Right? I mean, any given region can support fewer animals (in this case, humans) who eat a plant diet exclusively, than animals (humans) who eat those exact same plants PLUS meat. Especially if the animals that they eat feed on the kind of plant food (grass, for example) that have little or no nutritional value for humans.
Comment by Hasha — 23 January 2007 @ 2:28 PM
BTW Dana, I have a question for you. (Sorry everyone else, I know this is somewhat off topic.) What kind of stuff do you eat for breakfast? Lately, I’ve been eating almost exclusively various kinds of hot cereal (oatmeal and such), and I think it’s affecting me in a negative sort of way. But I don’t really know what else I might eat (I don’t eat bread; I could eat cold cereal, but that wouldn’t be any better, I don’t think). So maybe you can give me an idea. (Though of course, it’s a problem that I’m on a budget. And oatmeal is super-cheap.)
Comment by Hasha — 23 January 2007 @ 2:48 PM
Hasha,
Have you tried amaranth or quinoa? They aren’t grains so they don’t have the usual set of toxins, though they do contain saponins, so that might be an issue for you.
Comment by jhereg — 23 January 2007 @ 5:02 PM
[quote]Hasha,
Have you tried amaranth or quinoa? They aren’t grains so they don’t have the usual set of toxins, though they do contain saponins, so that might be an issue for you. [/quote]
No, I haven’t tried those; thanks for the suggestion, I’ll give it a shot!
Comment by Hasha — 23 January 2007 @ 5:07 PM
Hasha, I’d be happy to talk about my personal experience with raw/vegetarian foods (including the oddity that is my breakfast), though perhaps in a different forum, as this one really should stay dedicated to discussing Jason’s thesis. Feel free to email me at djaxfromucla2 (@t) yahoo (.) com. Sorry for the egyptian…trying to avoid spambots.
Regarding your previous post (#27), I don’t think that eating either way would significantly effect our carrying capacity in any manner. Humans are naturally ominvorous, meaning that if they are denied any one food source, they will move to another. If meat sources in an area dwindled, man would simply increase his consumption of plant products in that area, or move to another area altogether. So unless man was stretched to his absolute limit in an area, dependant on both meat and plant food, that wouldn’t be the case, and isn’t one of the basic assumptions of forager groups that they never live on the “edge” of sustainability? This has, in fact, recently been an issue in my mind. Everytime human groups get large enough to threaten the sustainability of an area, they develop civilization (and all its hangers-on, such as agriculture and general hierarchy). So Hasah, in a sense, it would appear to me that we are doing the very thing you mention right now, and doing so to our detriment as a species.
I am consistently brought back to the mildly disparaging thought that man exists, like other animals, in a state of population fluctuation, cyclically going from sustainable forager groups to civilizations that crash (because they are less naturally fit to suceed), based on, I guess, our prolific breeding nature and relatively long life spans. A good quote:
There’s no absolute reason why we couldn’t live in material sufficiency on this planet for millions of years. But prudence isn’t our forte. “Even our success becomes failure.” And, in a way, it’s not our fault. Long ago Natural Selection dealt us a bad hand — we’re sexually prolific, tribal, short-term and self-centered. And after thousands of years of trying, culture hasn’t changed that. And there is no sign that She will.
-Richard Duncan
Comment by Dana — 24 January 2007 @ 11:43 AM
I am coming in really, really late on this but I love talking about diet.
I am suspicious of the research claims that people on high-meat diets get cancer because of the meat consumption. Every veg*n (vegetarian/vegan shorthand) that I’ve seen make reference to this then goes off on a tangent about Big Macs causing cancer, or something in a similar vein. Here’s the thing. Meat isn’t the only food in a Big Mac. What’s holding the whole darned thing together? Right. Wheat bread. What *accompanies* the Big Mac? Right. French-fried potatoes. How about the drink? Mostly liquid corn. See where I’m going with this?
If you take a step back, quit trying to celebrate the funerals of meat-eaters before we’re even dead and take a good, objective look at the Standard American Diet, and recall that even the federal government says grains should be at the base of our Food Pyramid, where the cancer is coming from should make a lot more sense.
There’s a study going on right now, or was one recently, at an American university–either Iowa or Idaho, can’t recall now–where they are trying to figure out just *why* cancer cells need so much glucose to survive. This is something scientists have known for decades, that cancer cells need more glucose than normal cells. The hypothesis is that even as free radicals are known to cause cancerous changes in a cell, they are also more *destructive* to cancer cells, and therefore cancer cells need to eat more glucose to stave off that destruction.
If this is true it may explain why smokers in that research study back in the ’90s who got lung cancer while taking vitamin A suffered what they did: antioxidants might play a similar role to glucose in preserving the life of cancer cells.
It makes me nuts because I watched an online buddy die of breast cancer after undertaking a macrobiotic diet. She was basically grasping at straws by that point because the cancer had returned and was metastasizing to her brain and liver. I mentioned the glucose-cancer connection to her in passing and she was interested, but insisted the macrobiotic diet would do better for her. What’s one of the staple foods of macrobiotic eating? Rice. She passed away at the end of September.
But veg*ns go around talking smack about meat. OK, maybe there are toxins in meat. There are toxins in *breast milk.* Shall we all feed our infants formula now? Do I need to get into why that is a terrible idea? It seems to me that if one avoids the foods that feed cancer to begin with, one may fight off the effects of toxins more effectively. I could be wrong, but I wonder.
I will not deny that eating a wide variety of vegetables is a good idea. But some of the veggies we think of as healthy are actually not that great for us. Significantly, most or all of the not-so-great ones are domesticated. Fruits are a good food occasionally, but they are extremely seasonal, so how are they going to be a food staple in the HG existence?
Someone here questioned how our brains got so big on our protein intake. I just got done reading a really fascinating two-part article last night by a guy who has commented here occasionally in which he gets into why he thinks human infants are so fat. He thinks their body fat is for the purpose of fueling brain growth just in case the infant does not get optimal nutrition from other sources in its first three years of life. (This probably explains why the IQ difference between breastfed and formula-fed children is not significant enough to get the government riled up.) The bottom line being that the brain is largely made up of FAT and CHOLESTEROL, not protein.
You all should do some Google-searching for “no-carb diet” and see what you find. There aren’t very many people attempting that diet in itself, but what you’ll also find in the search results is lots of info on why a high-fat diet is really the best thing a human being can eat. This is almost impossible to achieve, by the way, on a vegetarian diet without using agriculture. I certainly know that when I’m eating more fat and less carbohydrate I feel more human, my blood sugar is more even (I’m not diabetic yet but I’m on the way), my moods are more even, I sleep better, I have zero heartburn and I drop weight like a stone, even without walking for four hours a day.
I question folks who gauge their feeling of wellness by how “high” they are. I don’t feel high, I feel clearheaded. We need to be able to connect with the world around us rather than being euphoric all the time.
So there’s my ten cents and change, for what it’s worth.
Comment by Dana Seilhan — 31 December 2007 @ 2:51 PM
You mentioned gender numerous times in this article, but you’re using the term incorrectly. Most of the time you seem to mean sex, which is biological (male, female, etc.).
Comment by Anonymous — 5 February 2008 @ 3:10 PM
Looks like someone already mentioned it and you replied. My bad. I’ll add, though, that if a male had a “woman’s” gender, they usually called it something different, which is how the 3rd and 4th and 5th gender catagories probably came about.
Comment by Anonymous — 5 February 2008 @ 4:01 PM
Well, not quite. That would simply mean two genders and two sexes. Third genders recognize that, while, say, a berdache has certain qualities in common with a female-gendered person, the basic facts of male-sexed existence make for a different experience, so you wouldn’t call a berdache a male-sexed, female-gendered person; you’d call him a male-sexed, berdache-gendered person. Animists live in their bodies too much to ever accept the fundamentally Cartesian assumptions of, say, transgenderism; the idea of “a woman trapped in a man’s body” makes no sense, except through the lens of Cartesian dualism. In animist cultures, you simply accept that they have an altogether different gender, not just a different combination.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 5 February 2008 @ 5:33 PM
The problem with the natural vegetarian thesis is that virtually all plants are incredibly toxic to humans and many are allergenic. There are only about 200 widely cultivated plants in the entire world. Many of these are naturally toxic such as potatoes, soy and cassava. All common foods plants have been extensively bred over millenia to make them more palatable and far less toxic than their wild ancestors. It took two centuries for potatoes and tomatoes to be widely used as foods in Europe because they were members of the exceptionally poisonous Nightshade family.
The only food product never shown to be allergenic to humans is red meat. There is not a single genuine red meat allergy documented in the entire medical literature. All grains, all dairy products, all legumes and most seeds are highly allergenic to many humans. This indicates that these were not a substantial part of our evolutionary diets.
Comment by Andrew — 22 March 2008 @ 9:47 PM
While your statements generally hold for Neolithic foods, like the ones you mentioned specifically, as well as the small number of cultivated plants, most plants do not have appreciable toxic levels. You really only have a small number of unsafe wild edibles. But we can domesticate very, very few plants, and most of them take the form of cereal grains. Eating seeds usually poses a problem, because the general plant-animal relationship focuses on plants providing food like fruits, in the hope of using animals to spread and fertilize seeds. If you eat the seed, then you essentially break the deal, so most plants make their seeds, to one degree or another, poisonous, in order to keep you from eating them. With cereal grains, we eat the seeds, leading to much of the trouble you’ve noted. Cereal grains will typically include things like lectins in their seeds, for instance. But most edible wild plants have no problem whatsoever. You can eat their leaves, flowers, roots, stems, and in some instances, yes, even their seeds, with no problem.
That said, no, no vegetarian society has ever existed.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 March 2008 @ 11:01 PM
Sorry Jason but as as someone with over 20 years food science experience I have to correct you. Wild plants as a rule are vastly more toxic than domesticated plants. All seeds contain lectins and phytates. Most also contain highly allergenic proteins and very toxic cyanogenic glycosides. Almost all wild tubers need extensive treatment to be edible. All wild plants have evolved to make their seeds as toxic and unpalatable as practically possible. There are very few wild mammals that eat a significant number of seeds. Any plant that isn’t toxic will get eaten immediately.
There is almost certainly NO wild plant in the entire world that can safely eaten in large quantities for an extended period by humans without ill effect. The only low-toxicity plants are grass stems. These are filled with highly abrasive silica as a defence against herbivores. Even true herbivores tend to eat a wide variety of plants in very small quantities. Poisoning of herbivores by wild plants is extremely common.
Most modern hunter-gatherers(except Inuits)live in exceptionally marginal areas with very few large animals. They are in no way representative of the way we lived 100,000 years ago. The small stature of almost all current hunter-gatherers indicates a long term adaptation to limited food. Starvation over winter was relatively common amongst Inuit. Humans and other mammals evolve towards large size when food is abundant. This is evident in the very large size of many pre-modern Polynesian cultures who had abundant food resources. The earliest skeletal remains of modern humans from the savannah show them to be very tall and extremely muscular.
The original savannah homeland of humans is populated by vast numbers of extremely large animals and an almost complete absence of any edible (to humans) plant materials. In fact many hunter-gatherers, such as traditional Australian Aborigines, will completely avoid eating plants if sufficient animal foods are available.
I myself eat nothing but meat, fish, eggs, a few berries and some cheese. I have been doing so for five years without any problems whatsoever.
Comment by Andrew — 23 March 2008 @ 12:05 AM
Your claims don’t really pass the sniff test, Andrew. You might have studied these things for decades, but if every plant contains so much poison, then how have plants and animals evolved the way they have? Why do humans eat plants at all? And what point does a plant have to invest so much energy into creating a fruit, if it really poisons the whole thing to make sure no animal can eat it? Your argument makes perfect sense for seeds, which you seem to talk about at first, but then you inexplicably seem to switch over to extend the way seeds work to the whole plant. No plant can offer food to humans for an extended time without ill effect? What about dandelion leaves? I’ve eaten them regularly for years now, and I’ve noticed my health generally improve because of it. What about fruit? What point does a plant have to produce fruit, if not in the hopes that animals will eat it? Doesn’t toxic fruit defeat the whole point of that? Wouldn’t that just mean that you have an extremely maladapted plant? Your claim brings with it the implication that over millions of years, plants have never managed to make the slightest adaptation to animals, when we can clearly see the evidence that they do bulging out of their ovaries and often dropping to the ground every year.
Now yes, most modern hunter-gatherers do survive in fairly impoverished pockets, but I wouldn’t say they have nothing in common with their Paleolithic ancestors, any more than we have nothing in common with the poor in our own society. They really have quite a bit in common, in terms of social organization and adaptation to the general demands of procuring wild foods. But I do agree that the general short stature of M’Buti, Bushmen and other modern hunter-gatherers does speak to the fact that they make their living in some of the world’s most hostile and unforgiving ecologies.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 23 March 2008 @ 9:06 AM
In fact plants have co-evolved with animals. The plants are highly toxic but the animals to a certain extent have biochemical adaptations to eating these plants. Wild herbivores actually ear a very small amount of many different plants. If you introduce livestock from one area into a an area with totally different flora you will often get mass poisonings. This occurs very commonly in northern Australia when cattle eat native cycads. Most animals eat new growth which is generally far less toxic than older leaves. The main consumers of plants are insects not mammals. Insects have usually evolved extremely closely with the host plant. Many insects will only consume one species of plants.
Certain Australian native plants produce monofluoroacetate or 1080 the most toxic small molecule poison known. It is totally colourless, tastless and odourless. There is no antidote. Many Australian native animals have evolved a tolerance to over millions of years. Cattle that eat these plants invariably die. Government authorities in Australia widely us 1080 baits to kill introduced rabbits and foxes. The rabbits or foxes will die but native animals are very rarely poisoned.
A classic case of co-evolution is parrots and chillies. Chillies are tropical plants from the central American jungles. The bright red fruits attract parrots. All birds are totally immune to the pungent capsaicin oils but mammals are not. Chillies actually have a drug like effect on parrots and the birds find them totally irresistable. The parrots spread the seeds throughout the jungle.
You incorrectly assume that most fruits are meant to be eaten by animals. Some are and some aren’t. Some fruits are simply to provide fertiliser for the seedling. The fruits of deadly nightshade are so toxic that a single berry can kill an adult human. Berries are mainly eaten by birds not mammals. Birds have no teeth and are very unlikely to bite into a toxic seed. I assume that you have a north American background. Edible berries are relatively common in Europe and North America. They are very much the exception in many places particularly Africa, Australia and South America.
The reason you can eat dandelions is because you only have a small amount,if you were to to eat a 1kg of them you would become extremely ill. Eating a kilogram of lettuce will induce extreme sleep for as long as 36 hours. Anything that tastes even slightly bitter is toxic. It is simply a matter of dosage. If you drink 20 cups of brewed coffee you will die from caffeine poisoning. Some people develop cardiac arythmias from drinking a single cup of tea or coffee. That is why bitterness is the predominant taste. Young children usually hate cabbage and broad beans. This is because their livers are not fully capable of properly metabolising the toxins found in these vegetables.
Much of what people eat is due to them being raised on those foods. There are virtually no edible plants native to northern Europe. For most of the past 200,000 years the world has been in an ice age. Glaciers extended as far south as Spain. There were no plant foods available for most of the year in Europe during these times.
All widely eaten northern European food plants except carrots and beets are introduced. There is absolutely no need to eat any plants at all. Meat has far higher concentrations of all vitamins and minerals than plant foods. Even vitamin C is found in fresh organ meats. There are also many important nutrients such as L-carnatine and carnosine which are found only in plants.
The renowned arctic explorer and anthropologist Vilhalmur Steffansen lived on nothing but meat and fish for 10 years. He and fellow arctic explorer Karsten Andersen took part in a supervised trial at Bellevue Hospital, New York, in 1928. They both ate nothing but meat for an entire year. The leading nutritional authorities in the world who observed the trial found absolutely no health problems in either subject. Both lived primarily on a meat and coffee diet for the rest of their lives. Steffansen died at the age of 83.
Comment by Andrew — 23 March 2008 @ 9:23 PM
“There are also many important nutrients such as L-carnatine and carnosine which are found only in plants” should read….found only in MEAT.
Comment by Andrew — 25 March 2008 @ 3:55 AM
There is no such thing as a vegetarian mammal. All plant eating mammals get the vast bulk of their nutrition from bacterial fermentation. Cattle on pasture derive almost their entire energy from amino acids and free fatty acids produced by rumen bacteria and almost none from carbohydrates. Cattle derive up to 3.5kg of protein a day from their rumination. In fact the average mammal utilises around 5g of protein for each Kg of body weight per day. That is around 10 times the US RDA for protein. It is equivalent to consuming 1.5kg of meat a day. That is about the meat consumption level of traditional Inuits, Masai and Plains Native Americans. The average 43kg adult Bushman female eats 0.8Kg of meat daily.
It was shown in the mid 1800s that grain consumption was strongly positively correlated with cancer rates in European cities. Those with the highest grain consumption had the highest cancer levels. Cancers were unknown amongst traditional Inuits. Cancer cells require glucose in higher levels than regular cells. Cancer patients often have an extreme loss of appetite known as cachexia. It is almost certainly an evolutionary mechanism to deprive cancers of glucose by inducing starvation.
Comment by Andrew — 25 March 2008 @ 4:22 AM
“The scientific evidence that man is meant to eat both plant and animal foods is overwhelming. One look at our teeth should be enough to convince”.
Comment by Dana — 23 January 2007 @ 5:32 AM
You cannot make any authoritative conclusion about an animal’s diet from it’s teeth or gut anatomy. Giant Panda’s, Black, Brown and Polar Bears have virtually identical teeth and gut anatomy. The Panda (which is also a bear) obtains 98% of it’s food from bamboo. The Black Bear is 95% vegetarian. The Brown Bear is an omnivore and the Polar Bear is totally carnivorous. Mountain dwelling Gelada Baboons eat only grass and have virtually identical teeth and guts to regular omnivorous baboons. Ocelots eat fruit unlike other cat species. Foxes are highly omnivorous despite being closely related to carnivorous dogs.
Comment by Andrew — 25 March 2008 @ 4:43 AM
but don’t you think it’s telling that the bear family tends towards omnivory and that each species which you listed more or less eats whatever is available?
i think that, if anything, this only supports the idea that humans have the capability of eating a diverse diet. i’m not saying it proves it, but it certainly doesn’t disprove it.
i confess tho’, that you may have a fair point in that what is possible for an animal to eat may not be what the animal tends to eat. Similarly, what an animal eats may or may not get digested efficiently by that animal. hmm, interesting implications, why don’t we all take the time to meditate on that a bit today?
Comment by jhereg — 25 March 2008 @ 6:53 AM
And why do you exclude Humans from this coevolutionary adaptation?
I’m fairly certain that the veracity of this statement depends entirely on your personal definitions of “large quantities” and “extended period”. If we go to the extreme: “No plant can be safely eaten exclusively forever”, then no one disagrees but it is a ridiculous statement. Thus, you need to be a bit more specific about this claim. Be sure to address fruit as a plant food. I’m fairly certain that you can safely eat, e.g. apples, in large quantities for an extended period without ill effect. If you are claiming “plant” as in eat the entire plant, then this is again a strawman that no one is suggesting.
Reference for this please? What chemical products in the dandelion leaves/flowers are going to cause this illness? What in lettuce is inducing sleep?
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 25 March 2008 @ 8:38 AM
well, considering 1kg of lettuce is over 27 cups and 1kg of raw dandelion greens is over 18 cups, i suspect the veracity of the statements are fairly pointless. it’s perspectives like this that make any practical discussion of diet so damn difficult.
just my $2.28 (adjusted for inflation)
Comment by jhereg — 25 March 2008 @ 11:47 AM
I have a relative who is rigorously following a paleodiet (he thinks), by having steak three times a day, and no bread. I’m worried he’s going overboard.
I strongly disagree with the theory behind the “Paleolithic Diet.” I think the authors have missed out on some of the more recent archaeological findings about ancient diets. Grinding stones are found in the Upper Paleolithic sites of Molodova I and V, Korman IV, Kosoutsy, and Ataki I and II, as well as many others in the Russian Plain, from 23,000 to 10,000 years ago. Many have microwear traces that match grass or other seed grinding practices, as well as possible nuts and roots. Bone digging implements may have been used for digging roots and bulbs, and stone cutting tools show wear indicative of cutting grass. Such stone plant processing tools go bak to the Middle Paleolithic in the Dnestr River area. These were people who hunted mammoth, horse, and reindeer. (Ilia Aleksandrovich Borziyak, Subsistence practices of Late Paleolithic groups along the Dnestr River and its tributaries, In, From Kostenki to Clovis: Upper Paleolithic Paleo-Indian Adaptations, edited by Olga Soffer and N. D. Praslov, Plenum Press, New York,1993.
At the Mesolithic (early Holocene, pre-Neolithic) hunter-gatherer site of Mirnoe in the northwest Black Sea region, archeologists have found thousands of small flint cutting blades that were hafted with bitumen into bone handles, and microwear studies show polish matching cutting of grasses and cane. The author theorizes wild grain harvesting with these sickle-like tools, and the species in this steppe environment may have included wild grasses, lambs quarter, knotweed, golden vetch (related to wild pea), providing the “Mesolithic hunters with the necessary carbons, starches, and vegetable fats missing in animal products. It is possible these seeds were stored in years of high yield” (p. 168, Galina Fedorovna Korobkova, The technology and function of tools in the context of regional adaptations, In, From Kostenki to Clovis: Upper Paleolithic Paleo-Indian Adaptation.).
The mammoth hunters of the Upper Paleolithic site of Dolni Vestonice, Moravia (eastern Europe), had sickle blades and grinding stones, and Walter Fairservis thinks these people could have harvested such edible seeds as Wild cereal grass (Glyceria fluitans), Common reed (Phragmites communis), Bog bean (Menyanthes trifoliata), water nut (Trapanatans), as well as arctic berries (The Threshold of Civilization: An Experiment in Prehistory, Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1975). Identification of a plant food mush found amazingly preserved by a hearth at Dolni Vestonice II contained wood charcoal, tissues from roots and tubers, one seed, and possible acorn mush. These sites date from 27,000 to 24,000 years ago. The main animal food hunted was reindeer, but mammoth remains are common also. (Clive Gamble, The Palaeolithic Societies of Europe, Cambridge World Archaeology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 2002.)
This was BEFORE agriculture, before the Neolithic, during stone age hunting phases.
Many Paleolithic sites also have pits dug into the ground in settlements, perhaps used for food storage, either frozen meat, bones full of marrow, or possibly grains or nuts.
In addition, Clovis hunters in North America (ca. 11-12,000 years ago) also used plant foods, something which is just coming to light with better archaeological methods: Seed-grinding stones have been found at Medicine Lodge Creek, the Betty Green site, Lookingbill, and the Myers-Hindman sites in the High Plains. The Medicine Lodge Creek site has at least 14 storage pits with the remains of food seeds: pine, juniper, Opuntia cactus, prune, sunflower, and amaranth — some charred. (Marcel Kornfield, Are Paleoindians of the Great Plains and Rockies subsistence specialists?, In, Foragers of the Terminal Pleistocene in North America, edited by Renee Walker and Boyce Driskell, University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 2007.)
These new findings are overthrowing the biased view of Pleistocene hunters as subsisting only on big game and meat. Plant foods do not preserve as well as bones, and just now are fine screening, delicate recovery methods being used to recover plant tissues.
I recommend the book Tending the Wild, by M. Kat Anderson, University of California Press: Berkeley, 2005, for detailed descriptions of the diets of stone age hunter-gatherers: California Indians used a huge variety of plant foods, including digging for potato-like tubers, bulbs, rhizomes, and collecting grass and wildflower seeds to make into pinole flour, unleavened bread cakes, and mush. Native grass grains collected include: Blue wildrye (Elymus glaucus), Desert needlegrass (Achnatherum speciosum), Purple needlegrass (Nassella pulchra), Wild barley (Horeum brachyanttheum), Fescues (Festuca spp.), Lovegrass (Eragrostis spp.), brome grass (Bromus spp.), Melic grass (Melica spp.), and others. Seeds were often stored in granaries, and have been found in archeological contexts 1,000 year old.
Grains are not bad! Tubers are not bad! Humans have been collecting them for tens of thousands of years. Yes white flour is not good, but whole grains are a good potential Paleolithic food.
Many groups of San of southern Africa actually used to depend on tubers dug from the ground as their staple. Meat was a nice meal once or twice a week, a treat much appreciated.
Savanna baboons thrive on picking up and eating fallen grass seeds to eat. Why not Australopithecus?
Negative evidence is not evidence in my book. We may never know what was going on with hominids a million years ago because so few things preserve in the fossil record that long ago. All I am saying is the picture looks more complex to me about our ancestors.
On thing I learned while working in the field of biology for years is that nothing is proven in science. There are theories, and the information presented about the “Paleolithic Diet” are interesting theories. I just wanted to alert people to OTHER theories that say grains, legumes, and tubers are good in the diet, and may be very ancient for Homo.( I eat a lot of these things and am quite healthy and happy by the way. I eat meat, greens, fruit, and grains.)
I do agree that Neolithic agriculturalists had more diseases, they even had decreased stature. But I would not credit this to grain consumption, but a monotonous diet. Instead of wandering over a wide area gathering many leafy greens, digging roots and tubers, collecting nuts and berries, and harvesting wild grasses, as well as hunting, they reduced down to a few species of domesticated plants. Diversity is the key to health, and that can include grains (in my theory).
Comment by lizard — 8 May 2008 @ 8:01 PM
Hey –
The Paleo diet in NOT about eating ONLY meat products, dude. In fact, it is about eating the widest variety of foods possible, in most cases, instead of relying on only a few staple crops (as agriculturalists do). Sure, even grains were harvested and eaten prior to the ag revolution…. but they were likely eaten seasonally at most, but in many cases may have been used as starvation foods………..
Janene
Comment by Janene — 9 May 2008 @ 3:23 PM
Whenever I protest about the Paleodiet, people give me these huge assumptions, like “used as starvation foods.” How can anyone know what our ancestors ate 50,000 years ago, or in what quantities? Do you have a time machine? Reading information about the paleodiet, I find talk that grains are “toxic.” In my opinion this is really unsubstantiated. Sure grains were harvested seasonally, I can but that, but they may also have been stored in pits. I’m just trying to bring up some other scientific evidence, but I see I am running into the “food religion.”
Comment by lizard — 9 May 2008 @ 8:23 PM
Hey –
I did not say that it WAS starvation food… i said it may have been… and this is based on what we see from more more modern incarnations of h-g peoples…
As far as toxins… it is quiet well established that grains are hard to digest, that they contain anti-nutrients and that they are high in various toxins. It is the plants natural defenses to being eaten.
Primarily I was responding to your unstated assumption that the paleo diet required eating only meat — or even almost only meat. That is not the case. There are a couple very specific plant families that have become agricultural staples that are not really terribly healthy. Beyond those, eat anything you want. Myself, I eat roughly six servings of vegies a day, with a minimum of ten different vegetables, a couple servings of fruit and at least one starch — usually a tuber of some kind — even when I am specifically trying to lose weight. When I am maintaining, the starch and fruits are increased….. that’s a far cry from your ‘three steaks a day’ comment.
Janene
Comment by Janene — 9 May 2008 @ 8:59 PM
Well, gathering obviously did not play a major role in every h-g culture. It is thought, for example, that the Inuit rarely ever ate plant food and that, in fact, the original assertion that they ate the stomach contents of caribou may have arisen from a practical joke played on white explorers by the Inuit. Who, of course, would never ever do such a thing.
Also, where toxins occur in animal bodies they tend to be very localized in glands, and most of the critters hunted by early humans wouldn’t have had toxic traits to begin with. Contrast this with plants for which, when they are toxic, the toxin tends to be distributed throughout the plant or through several of the plant’s parts.
It would have taken a long time to build up a repertoire of edible plants; longer still to learn how to work around existing toxins and, as we’ve seen in modern times, we still have not accounted properly for all the remaining toxins we still ingest from plants that over time collectively harm our health. It’s interesting to read the Weston A. Price stuff indicating that traditional fermentation methods got rid of a lot of these chemicals but it was probably by accident. The only chemicals you can consciously avoid are the obvious ones that cause immediate harm, if you don’t have access to a science lab.
So I think h-gs depended a lot more on animal food than people want to admit–maybe even you, Jason.
Now. That doesn’t mean women had no use. It doesn’t even mean that the only use we had in a tribe was bearing and raising the children. I think we are overlooking something really important here in our drive to make men and women as alike as we can in the interest of “fairness.”
Think about what it means to raise children. What’s involved? Get past the way we do it now, forget about schooling. What do we do when we raise our kids? The standard answer might be “teach them right from wrong” or “teach them how to behave properly.” Exactly. It’s our job to teach them our culture.
And with work in a h-g tribe being largely divided by gender, who do you think was passing on the culture to the kids? Maybe now it makes a little more sense why so many of the indigenous cultures have been matriarchal/matrilineal.
Here’s another bee to stick in your bonnet. Maybe the women WERE the culture, for the most part, in the way that men are civilized culture now. The men wouldn’t have been around that much anyway if they had to go out hunting a lot. Do you think the women just waited around til the men got home to live their real lives and their culture? Me neither.
I don’t think any kind of man-hatred thing was in play, either. Actually, I think hunting might have served a dual purpose of feeding the tribe and letting the men get that aggression out of their systems. I don’t think it’s a myth that men had more aggression to begin with, on average. I’ve been acquainted with FTM transsexuals who have explained some of their journey to me, what’s been involved with the hormone treatments and the side-effects, and I’ve read about what steroid supplementation does even to born-men. Nowadays the extra aggression gets channeled into stupid and destructive behavior more often than not. (Up to and including industrialized war.) Back then you went hunting, or the elders gave you a stick and sent you off to beat up a tree.
Another facet of this is that somebody had to do food preservation at home. The men would have been tired from hunting. And, again, they weren’t home as much as the women were (wherever “home” happened to be at the time–base camp, whatever). That left the food prep/preservation to the women. So I don’t see how the women had all this time to go around picking plants all day.
For what it’s worth, and admittedly I have no background in anthro other than what I filter through those who do.
Comment by Dana — 16 October 2008 @ 3:14 PM
Hunter gather males exert staggering amounts of energy. The most efficient and safest hunting method is to chase a large animal until it is totally exhausted before killing it. This is the methodology of wolves. Humans have the most energy efficient running style of all mammals.
A trained human can outrun any herbivore over a long distance. This method is still used today in Botswana to hunt antelope. A group of three or four men find the tracks of a large antelope and pursue it until it collapses from exhaustion. This typically involves chases of 80-100km equivalent to brisk jogging for up to 12 hours. It takes a very fit human up to three days to recover fully from such an effort. This includes normalisation of heart rate and restoration of glycogen stores. In fact traditional hunter gather males typically do very little physical activity between hunting expeditions. This is to hasten recovery. A large mammal will provide 2-3 days food. The hunters will have physically recovered enough by the time more meat is required.
Because the men are physically exhausted much of the time the women pay a very important role in maintenance of tribal life. They gather water and firewood, care for children and prepare food. They also provide supplementary food such as insects and small animals.
Comment by Andrew — 16 October 2008 @ 6:20 PM
Comment by jhereg — 25 March 2008 @ 11:47 AM
Reference for this please? What chemical products in the dandelion leaves/flowers are going to cause this illness? What in lettuce is inducing sleep?
well, considering 1kg of lettuce is over 27 cups and 1kg of raw dandelion greens is over 18 cups, i suspect the veracity of the statements are fairly pointless. it’s perspectives like this that make any practical discussion of diet so damn difficult.
just my $2.28 (adjusted for inflation)
———————————–
Dandelion stems contain both latex and a number of bitter alkaloids - they taste absolutely disgusting. It would be difficult to eat even a single dandelion stem. These toxins have evolved to prevent grazing by large mammals such as cattle which are unable to delicately nibble the flowers and avoid the stems.
Lettuce contains lactucin a very powerful somnolent. Eating large amounts of lettuce was an effective traditional remedy for insomnia (bland modern lettuces such as ‘iceberg’ have no such effect). An animal, such as a rabbit, that eats a wild lettuce is likely to become quite drowsy and more easily killed by a predator. Peter Rabbit, the 19th century children’s book character, eats some lettuce and then falls asleep. There is also an early 20th century account of a very hungry English greengrocer who ate three whole lettuces. He slept solidly for 36 hours and his family were unable to wake him.
Comment by Andrew — 16 October 2008 @ 6:36 PM
This seems a ridiculous statement. Depending on how you define efficiency, the most efficient method is either “stalk and shoot” or “hide and shoot”. Even better is trapping. Read up on how the !Kung hunt.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 20 October 2008 @ 10:44 AM
So you bring up a lot of good points, HOWEVER, there are a few things I would like to say. First, on walking. Other animals can move just as much as we. Walking is not that great. It reminds me of other scenarios were animals died out, we just happened to survive, instead of retreating into the jungle. We ended up depending so much on our “mind” that now if civilization does die out, we will not be able to run from our predators, nor do half of humankind even know how to take care of themselves any longer. Though that is a bit beside the point.
Second, there is nothing wrong with vegetarianism. I myself am not vegetarian, but you have made two senseless attacks against them. Read your own writing, “Sharing evolved not as a virtue, but as a necessity. In forager groups today, sharing is not considered “nice,” it’s simply expected as a social baseline, and as a requirement for survival.”
Then you go on to say, “[Hunting] is violent, yet its risks gave us the very notion of society and its attendant virtues of sharing, cooperation, and compassion–the very same virtues vegetarians seek to promote by denying that very thing that created them.”
Make up your mind. Is sharing a virtue as it has come to be expressed in our modern society when it is no longer needed to survive, or is it a necessity of life that has become out-dated? You can’t have it both ways. Vegetarians simply see that to eat meat is no longer necessary for survival, therefore, rather than eating plant being a “virtue”, eating meat is unnecessary animal violence. We now have the intellectual capacity to see our way around such primitive techniques for survival, and yet we do not. Sharing and cooperation has been run into the ground, only coming out as “necessity” in other areas of human life, such as business and often in these times, a revived sense of agriculture and community life. Sharing as a necessity or virtue has nothing to do with vegetarianism, and further, there is nothing wrong with the practice as you seem to be implying. Stick to your topic.
Further, it seems that you believe that “humans” became truly human when they developed their own religious philosophy surrounding their capability to sacrifice animals via hunting. Why is this? That part of your thesis seems to be very under-developed, and just thrown in as opinion, not fact. The way we conceive of concepts regarding life and survival has nothing to do with biology, as you stated before when speaking of handedness, tool-making, and language. If coming up with a philosophy really made us human, it would have been this first concept derived from the necessity to survive, nothing religious. That is just an expanded concept on necessity. Not to mention, perhaps then there are many “humans” who are not truly human, because they have yet to create a concept of their own, that was not just passed down before them. (The latter is meant to be a bit of a joke.- haha)
“Most animals, when confronted by fire, have a natural instinct to run away. At some point, long ago in our history, that instinct was stalled by our acculturation, and rather than run from it, some human actually went towards it, and brought it back under her own control.” o.O Are you for real? Most people, when not knowing whether or not a male or female did something, default to the man because it means “mankind”. You went OUT OF YOUR WAY here to imply that a female was the first person to be so stupid as to run towards the fire. You need to watch yourself mister, because your biases are coming through. If you don’t want to be judged yourself, do not judge others, because you’re not as subtle as you think you are. This needs correction, because it is insulting to females.. obviously you in some way think less of females than males, to step out and make such a distinction when there is no way you could know which gender first became stupid enough to grasp for fire, as you so seem to put it.
Judging by the current state of human civilization, the answer to your question is “overkill”. This is what has happened repeatedly as humans have moved from contnent to continent, destroying all in their wake and spreading their population until we cover the face of the Earth. Yes, there are debates on either side, but it doesn’t take a genius to look around and see what state the world is in now and why it’s like that… But that does not mean we are inherently destructive. As you said, we are not good nor evil. HOWEVER our actions can be very much of either. When we see we have caused destruction, with the use of our intellect, we do have a responsibility out of NECESSITY to restore the world we have destroyed. For, if this ecosystem fails due to our activities, we too will fail and be destroyed. Which means going back t necessity. Sharing and cooperation for survival. Stopping systems that are inherently destructive - because WE are not inherently destructive, yet the system we live in is, and it is not the only way of life that is available. To think so is ludicrous. This doesnt mean going back to hunter-forager times but to learn to live in accordance with the land, instead of like our homo habilis ancestors who were too stupid to move with the forest, instead creating more work for themselves and everyone. To survive, we must grow our own food in a way that is NOT damaging to the land - it’s called sustainable agriculture (permaculture - a permanent culture) and living in community-based groups. This reinstates the egalitarian concept of life rather than perpetuating the stagnant selfishness of our current culture. Humans are not inherently good or bad, you’re right, but these activities are inherently BETTER because they would be working toward our survival. Unless you want to become like one of the humans that falls off the face of the Earth, you should stop talking about it and DO something about it, which doesn’t mean fighting with people, it means working together in cooperation and putting aside your differences. Something you might need to learn to do instead of looking to history to support your biased views about women and vegetarianism, cause that separatist bias will not get you far.
I’m done reading your article now. And to think, at first I came in thinking I was going to learn something from a truly educated and helpful individual.
Comment by Anonymous — 21 June 2009 @ 5:47 AM