Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Medical journal essay: We don’t really know what paleo man ate

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

(Possibly, the survivors ate anything that wasn’t poisonous but, oops, we digress…  All we know is, he didn’t shop at Whole Foods.)

Further to “Conference of fake evolution theories indistinguishable from conference of real ones?”, there is the “Paleolithic Diet” and its unprovable links to our past”

From Medical Xpress:

The basic argument goes something like this: over millions of years natural selection designed humans to live as hunter-gatherers, so we are genetically “mismatched” for the modern urbanised lifestyle, which is very different to how our pre-agricultural ancestors lived.

Bunk-o

For advocates of the palaeolithic lifestyle, life at this time is portrayed as a kind of biological paradise, with people living as evolution had designed them to: as genetically predetermined hunter-gatherers fit for their environment.

But when ethnographic records and archaeological sites are studied we find a great deal of variation in the diet and behaviour, including activity levels, of recent foragers.

Our ancestors – and even more recent hunter-gatherers in Australia – exploited foods as they became available each week and every season. They ate a vast range of foods throughout the year.

They were seasonably mobile to take advantage of this: recent foraging groups moved camps on average 16 times a year, but within a wide range of two to 60 times a year.

There seems to have been one universal, though: all people ate animal foods. How much depended on where on the planet you lived: rainforests provided few mammal resources, while the arctic region provided very little else.

Studies show on average about 40% of their diet comprised hunted foods, excluding foods gathered or fished. If we add fishing, it rises to 60%.

Even among arctic people such the as Inuit whose diet was entirely animal foods at certain times, geneticists have failed to find any mutations enhancing people’s capacity to survive on such an extreme diet.

Chances are, they won’t find such mutations. The Arctic people were often stuck up there because in ancient North America, competition for resources was sometimes fierce and there was no right of free migration. The history suggests that people survived, but didn’t necessarily adapt.

For a sense of the paleo nonsense, see also:

Journalist wonders, why Creation Museum inspires rage, whole foods scams don’t (sky fell last night too, by the way)

and

“The evolutionary psychologist knows why you vote — and shop, and tip at restaurants”

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Hat tip: Bioethics.com

Comments
Darwin's finches aren't even Darwin's finches. ;-)Silver Asiatic
December 4, 2014
December
12
Dec
4
04
2014
05:58 AM
5
05
58
AM
PDT
I suppose this doesn't count for much, but the lifespan of modern humans is several times longer than our pre-agricultural ancestors. So I'm not quite sure why it would matter what those short-lived ancestors ate. Humans are endlessly adaptable. We can survive in the Arctic and in the Kalahari. We can survive on small islands in the middle of the ocean and on the vast grasslands of Ukraine and the American Great Plains. We are clearly NOT Darwin's finches.mahuna
December 2, 2014
December
12
Dec
2
02
2014
01:59 PM
1
01
59
PM
PDT
For advocates of the palaeolithic lifestyle, life at this time is portrayed as a kind of biological paradise, with people living as evolution had designed them to: as genetically predetermined hunter-gatherers fit for their environment.<
The editors at Medical Xpress should be very careful about this kind of talk. It sounds somewhat irreverent and possibly a slap against the greatness that is Darwin. You mean people lived in a way that was not as "evolution had designed them to be", not "fit for their environment"? Ok, worded poorly. What they really meant is "evolution didn't just design them to eat meat, but to perfectly fit their environment by eating anything that evolution designed the stomach to eat and eventually to buy Caramel Lattes at Starbucks". That was frightening. Someone almost got fired there. [Thank you editing feature! Another ugly-looking post rescued.]Silver Asiatic
December 2, 2014
December
12
Dec
2
02
2014
08:32 AM
8
08
32
AM
PDT

Leave a Reply