3 ms·
Another complication is that most of our ancestors would probably only have been "feasting" on meat - there wouldn't have been any bread, sugar, palm oil, etc.
by centimeter 6y ago
Another complication is that most of our ancestors would probably only have been "feasting" on meat - there wouldn't have been any bread, sugar, palm oil, etc. in the mix.
- AlotOfReading 6y agoI'm not sure that's correct. Honey and fruit feasts are both quite common among extant forager groups in Africa. I don't see why our ancestors wouldn't have made use of the same resources.
- hprotagonist 6y agothat's at best a very contentious claim. Midden heaps tend to preserve bones longer than carrot-tops, though, which certainly skews the record. Certainly the vast majority of humanity throughout written history -- numerically, the bulk of our ancestry -- has subsisted primarily on non-meat foods, be they wheat, barley, maize, or whatever. Peasants were not regularly eating meat; often we have the written record to point to for that, as well as archaeological evidence from grave finds and the like. and my usual critique of "paleo" holds here, which is that it ignores evolution. As a species, we've evolved the persistence of digesting lactose at least twice, in independent subgroups, through two different metabolic pathways, so it's not like we're incapable of getting used to dietary shifts over the span of human history.