6 ms·

I agree with the headline (and so would the "Paleo diet" people, in quotes because that's marketing, not a historical claim), but the Hadza aren't my ancestors,

I agree with the headline (and so would the "Paleo diet" people, in quotes because that's marketing, not a historical claim), but the Hadza aren't my ancestors, or particularly closely related to them. That's true of non sub-Saharan people generally. More importantly, no contemporary hunter-gatherers are a good model for pre-agricultural people (to call them hunter-gatherers at that time is to imply there were other sorts of people, which there were not). The remaining people practicing such a folkway live on marginal land, the harsh truth of human existence being that if it was rich enough for agriculture, or good for pastoralism, those lifestyles would have won out. Evidence for eating anything we could get our hands on, including quite a bit of meat, is abundant in paleoarchaeology. What no one ate as much of is grains, specifically ground grains. We know this because, while grinding stones date back hundreds of thousands of years, the tooth wear patterns which indicate a diet primarily based on flour are not evident in remains until agriculture. My point being that the Hadza speciality in honey-scavenging is much like the Inuit speciality in seals: it's an adaptation to circumstances which suits them, but probably doesn't teach us much about how we can eat healthy, or much about how our pre-agricultural ancestors tended to eat.

crazygringo 4y ago
> The remaining people practicing such a folkway live on marginal land, the harsh truth of human existence being that if it was rich enough for agriculture, or good for pastoralism, those lifestyles would have won out. That's a bit too harsh, and I spent a couple weeks living with the Hadza at one point. Even went honey-gathering with them up into a Baobab tree, although I was too scared to stick my hand in. They live in the African savannah, which is where humankind first evolved. Olduvai Gorge, where some of the oldest hominid fossils have been found, is basically next door to the Hadza. So while yes, Intuits are adapted to "extreme" conditions, the Hadza are living in the most "native human" conditions possible. It is anything but marginal, as there has been no evidence or history of famine ever in the Hadza people. It is true that the area is ill-suited for agriculture, which is why the Hadza have remained, but agriculture is a very recent invention in evolutionary terms. That doesn't make the savannah "marginal". Also, the idea that you're not particularly closely related to the Hadza is obviously false, since we all share an ancestry with the original sub-Saharan hominids. If you're of European descent, for example, you share more with the Hadza than you do with those of East Asian descent -- as they also share more with the Hadza than they would with you. You're correct in that this might not have much applicability to a modern diet, but it is valuable in puncturing myths such as the idea that "paleo" people never ate anything high in sugar. I do personally wonder if things like honey were common worldwide, though, whether it's berries or saps or syrups or similar.
- lettergram 4y ago
  In the northern hemisphere, only meat could sustain humans through winter. The cold also kept the meat better longer. I have to imagine that over a few hundred thousand years the savannah changed as well as the world as a whole. We are probably adapted based on our genetics rather substantially to particular diets. I can imagine gathering berries and honey would be more common in temperate or tropical climates. But in the colder climates milk, cheese, eggs and meat had to be a larger percentage of the diet.
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  Ok. Please write your autobiography. :-)
- fjabre 4y ago
  “They live in the African savannah, which is where humankind first evolved” We have some evidence to suggest that early humans were there but it is a huge assumption and leap of faith to make a statement like this with certainty. This statement is more likely a religious statement than one a good scientist would make. A good scientist would not make such a bold assumption without putting it in quotes or a star next to it. You cannot make this statement definitively.
  - hactually 4y ago
    As far as I was aware, this is established fact. Do you have any counter arguments that myself and the OP may have missed?
    - fjabre 4y ago
      Do you believe it is in fact established? Science discovers new ‘facts’ all the time. To say definitively that humans first evolved here in the context of a 4 billion year old planet seems irresponsible at best.
      - crazygringo 4y ago
        My understanding is that the known fossil record is extremely clear on this, and is additionally quite consistent to the extent where I'm unaware of any competing hypotheses that are taken seriously. As far as science goes, it seems to be as established as it gets. Again, unless you've got convincing evidence to the contrary. Really not sure what your agenda is here?
jiggywiggy 4y ago
One thing it teaches us is that meat & animal products, especially fat, has been a central part of the diet for most of our ancestral tribal cultures. Since dairy, meat and animal fats are being vilified at the moment by the modern nutritional zeitgeist. It might be worth being skeptical of such a strong rejection of these food categories. Especially since we can't figure out the root causes of certain modern diseases as autoimmune, extreme rise in cancers, neurological and heart disease.
- dividedbyzero 4y ago
  A large part from that is due to the abhorrent conditions that most meat is produced in and the fact that (IIRC) livestock amounts to 15 times the biomass of all wild mammals combined right now. If you tally up land used to feed livestock and all the other side effects of the meat industry, it doesn't look very sustainable to me. It's kinda hard to have almost 8 billion people live like hunter gatherers I guess.
  - jiggywiggy 4y ago
    I agree the situation in many stables is abhorrent. However. Online im able to get meat from "wild" cows who roam free in certain "nature" areas.
    - dividedbyzero 4y ago
      Imagine trying to scale this sort of thing so it can serve everyone instead of a narrow affluent slice of the most affluent societies.
      - Slava_Propanei 4y ago
        It sounds like scale is the problem.
      - Amezarak 4y ago
        I eat grass-fed local cows and its almost half the price per lb as regular ground beef at Walmart, and obviously includes every cut there is. We probably need to increase the number of farms and farmers, and decentralize agriculture. Bonus side effect: it’s more resilient to shocks like Covid taking out a few meat packing plants or a natural disaster taking out the massive Smithfield facility in Virginia.
Retric 4y ago
Ware patterns are a very long term effect. Hunter gathering was a seasonal diet so they would have eaten more grains in some periods and less in others. In areas with abundant natural grains it’s likely their diets did consist primarily of grains for some portion of the year. From a survival standpoint low effort and especially low risk calories are really hard to ignore.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  There is nothing low effort about grains. They don't simply grow abundantly in nature without other animals eating them. In addition, before manual cultivation, wild, non selectively bred grains were nothing like modern grains.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    We’ve forgotten how many cultures ate acorns when they were available. Acorns are about 40% carbs. Unlike apples and many other tree nuts, there’s not a lot of evidence they have been selectively bred for larger fruits. “Native” oaks produce a noteworthy amount of nuts. But the thing with nuts is that they have multi year cycles to break the foraging ladder. Every few years the whole forest produces five times as many seeds as in a normal year, and then famine and predation pulls the nut eating population back down. Only humans are clever enough to really exploit those patterns. A child would learn to make acorn bread, but couldn’t count on it being available except for short periods and then every so many years. [edit to add] if memory serves, in the modern era we are down to some First Nations populations and Korea for cultures that still eat acorns regularly.
    - layer8 4y ago
      I believe the paleo crowd doesn’t argue against nuts.
      - hinkley 4y ago
        Yes, but, acorns stand out as one of the starchiest nuts, which is why they make bread out of it. A modern walnut for instance is about 18g of fat, 4 of protein, and 4 of carbs per ounce. And while the size of the fruit would have been increased under cultivation, I'm not sure the mix of nutrients would have shifted all that far. A 'modern' acorn is 6.8:1.7:11.5. That is a starch. The limiting factor with acorns is that if you eat them raw the tannins will get you. You have to soak it out before eating them. We've had pottery for at least twice as long as the time since the end of the Paleolithic era. If soaked in leather bags or nets, then much older than that. And since oak tannins are one of the older techniques for processing leather, I think it's safe to say we've been collecting them since the back end of forever.
hinkley 4y ago
> that if it was rich enough for agriculture, or good for pastoralism, those lifestyles would have won out. Have you read Guns, Germs and Steel? Agriculture and Colonialism went together, club and hand, not fork and hand. Agriculture didn’t win so much as it conquered the world at spear point. I’ve even read a few feminist things recently that tie sexism to agriculture, one even claims that the plow is the worst thing to happen to women. That gives a much darker sentiment to “beating swords into plowshares”.
- User23 4y ago
  Guns, Germs, and Steel is thoroughly discredited pop science. And even then you’re misrepresenting its claims. Look to David Reich and his students for actual evidence based science on human migrations. And of course there are virtually no impartial contemporary works on the Age of Exploration, because the politics of our day require vilifying those civilizations. The objective reality is that the colonial period was just one of many human migrations. It wasn’t the worst, it wasn’t the first, it’s not the last, and there will be more, including the largest mass migrations in human history occurring right now.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    How about 1491? He straight up claims the arrival of manioc in Africa contributed to a population boom that presaged the slave trade. Agricultural societies can subjugate conquered lands so much faster than hunter gatherer and nomadic peoples. It takes far longer to adapt to native food sources than to bring in annual crops that not only take but a few years to establish, but also require removing the forests and prairies of the defeated culture to do it. There is nothing for you here anymore. Assimilate to your new masters. Also if anyone has refuted that patterns of conquest around the world have been highly amplified in east-west bands because of the biomes those territories represent, I’d love to hear it.
    - throwaway8582 4y ago
      > Agricultural societies can subjugate conquered lands so much faster than hunter gatherer and nomadic peoples. Nomadic people are quite capable of conquering land, the most obvious example being Genghis Khan, who managed to build the Mongol empire into the largest in human history. It is true there is a general trend in history of agricultural societies displacing hunter/gather societies, but that's simply because agriculture generates more calories per square kilometer than a hunter/gatherer lifestyle. As populations grow beyond the carrying capacity of the natural environment, hunter/gatherers either forced to adopt agriculture or get conquered by the larger armies of those people that have.
guerrilla 4y ago
> the harsh truth of human existence being that if it was rich enough for agriculture, or good for pastoralism, those lifestyles would have won out. I don't buy this explanation at all. You could say the exact opposite: their land provides so well that they don't need to. I'm find with not knowing which, that's up to scientists who actually study that; not something that can be deduced a priori.
- jbotz 4y ago
  I think you're missing the point... agriculture allows for greater population density and specialization, which makes armies possible (not to mention technology leading to superior armaments), which in turn means that when the two enter into conflict, the militarized agricultural society wins. It's not a value judgement about which lifestyle is better, but if hunter-gatherers live on land that's good for agriculture, then eventually an agricultural society will want that land, and the rest is history. This old story is still playing out today, with the very few hunter-gatherers remaining being wiped out as we speak.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    I think you're missing the point... the only reason you'd need any of that is if it were useful to you. If your environment provides everything you need, then it isn't. Everything you describe needs to be driven by needs. If those needs don't exist because all wants are satisfied in such a society, then there's no push or pull to do all of that. I think you're basing your comment on the assumption that they're missing out on something, but this is exactly what I'm challenging. If you wanted to convince me, you'd have to establish without a doubt that they do have the shit land and that they live in poverty and don't get what they need and are completely marginalized; however, that's far from what I've seen in documentations about them (ignoring notable exceptions.)
AlotOfReading 4y ago
Evidence for eating anything we could get our hands on, including quite a bit of meat, is abundant in paleoarchaeology. This is quite far from the truth. The hadza are specific about the foods they gather and are known to have a number of food taboos. Women and children are forbidden from eating hearts, for example, while men can't eat tortoises. Also, the carbs in the title are primarily coming from tubers, often called underground storage organs (USOs) in the literature. Grain is a much later thing, as you mentioned. The thing you're critiquing is ethnographic analogy. The sucks doesn't do a good job of clarifying this, but the accepted modern usage is not to say "this is exactly how ancient humans lived", but rather to illuminate a small part of the spectrum of possible lifeways and what constraints they might have been optimizing.
r_hoods_ghost 4y ago
"What no one ate as much of is grains, specifically ground grains." From the article... "Recently, there’s been some really cool work looking at the little bit of plaque and calculus stuck to the teeth in fossilized hominids. If you look at that, you’ll find remains of plants and starches. So we actually do have preserved evidence that early humans are eating lots of starchy vegetable foods. There’s even some evidence of a primitive flourlike substance that’s made out of grains. That kind of thing is anathema to most Paleo diets, which say that you can’t eat grains because grains are a farmed food." Can't have evidence mucking up your belief system eh?
- Slava_Propanei 4y ago
  Root vegetables are not grains.
- samatman 4y ago
  The only evidence this provides is that you can't understand plain English at the sophomore reading level. Or you choose not to, specifically to be aggressive and rude, which is worse.

crazygringo 4y ago

> The remaining people practicing such a folkway live on marginal land, the harsh truth of human existence being that if it was rich enough for agriculture, or good for pastoralism, those lifestyles would have won out. That's a bit too harsh, and I spent a couple weeks living with the Hadza at one point. Even went honey-gathering with them up into a Baobab tree, although I was too scared to stick my hand in. They live in the African savannah, which is where humankind first evolved. Olduvai Gorge, where some of the oldest hominid fossils have been found, is basically next door to the Hadza. So while yes, Intuits are adapted to "extreme" conditions, the Hadza are living in the most "native human" conditions possible. It is anything but marginal, as there has been no evidence or history of famine ever in the Hadza people. It is true that the area is ill-suited for agriculture, which is why the Hadza have remained, but agriculture is a very recent invention in evolutionary terms. That doesn't make the savannah "marginal". Also, the idea that you're not particularly closely related to the Hadza is obviously false, since we all share an ancestry with the original sub-Saharan hominids. If you're of European descent, for example, you share more with the Hadza than you do with those of East Asian descent -- as they also share more with the Hadza than they would with you. You're correct in that this might not have much applicability to a modern diet, but it is valuable in puncturing myths such as the idea that "paleo" people never ate anything high in sugar. I do personally wonder if things like honey were common worldwide, though, whether it's berries or saps or syrups or similar.

lettergram 4y ago
In the northern hemisphere, only meat could sustain humans through winter. The cold also kept the meat better longer. I have to imagine that over a few hundred thousand years the savannah changed as well as the world as a whole. We are probably adapted based on our genetics rather substantially to particular diets. I can imagine gathering berries and honey would be more common in temperate or tropical climates. But in the colder climates milk, cheese, eggs and meat had to be a larger percentage of the diet.
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
Ok. Please write your autobiography. :-)
fjabre 4y ago
“They live in the African savannah, which is where humankind first evolved” We have some evidence to suggest that early humans were there but it is a huge assumption and leap of faith to make a statement like this with certainty. This statement is more likely a religious statement than one a good scientist would make. A good scientist would not make such a bold assumption without putting it in quotes or a star next to it. You cannot make this statement definitively.
- hactually 4y ago
  As far as I was aware, this is established fact. Do you have any counter arguments that myself and the OP may have missed?
  - fjabre 4y ago
    Do you believe it is in fact established? Science discovers new ‘facts’ all the time. To say definitively that humans first evolved here in the context of a 4 billion year old planet seems irresponsible at best.
    - crazygringo 4y ago
      My understanding is that the known fossil record is extremely clear on this, and is additionally quite consistent to the extent where I'm unaware of any competing hypotheses that are taken seriously. As far as science goes, it seems to be as established as it gets. Again, unless you've got convincing evidence to the contrary. Really not sure what your agenda is here?

jiggywiggy 4y ago

One thing it teaches us is that meat & animal products, especially fat, has been a central part of the diet for most of our ancestral tribal cultures. Since dairy, meat and animal fats are being vilified at the moment by the modern nutritional zeitgeist. It might be worth being skeptical of such a strong rejection of these food categories. Especially since we can't figure out the root causes of certain modern diseases as autoimmune, extreme rise in cancers, neurological and heart disease.

dividedbyzero 4y ago
A large part from that is due to the abhorrent conditions that most meat is produced in and the fact that (IIRC) livestock amounts to 15 times the biomass of all wild mammals combined right now. If you tally up land used to feed livestock and all the other side effects of the meat industry, it doesn't look very sustainable to me. It's kinda hard to have almost 8 billion people live like hunter gatherers I guess.
- jiggywiggy 4y ago
  I agree the situation in many stables is abhorrent. However. Online im able to get meat from "wild" cows who roam free in certain "nature" areas.
  - dividedbyzero 4y ago
    Imagine trying to scale this sort of thing so it can serve everyone instead of a narrow affluent slice of the most affluent societies.
    - Slava_Propanei 4y ago
      It sounds like scale is the problem.
    - Amezarak 4y ago
      I eat grass-fed local cows and its almost half the price per lb as regular ground beef at Walmart, and obviously includes every cut there is. We probably need to increase the number of farms and farmers, and decentralize agriculture. Bonus side effect: it’s more resilient to shocks like Covid taking out a few meat packing plants or a natural disaster taking out the massive Smithfield facility in Virginia.

Retric 4y ago

Ware patterns are a very long term effect. Hunter gathering was a seasonal diet so they would have eaten more grains in some periods and less in others. In areas with abundant natural grains it’s likely their diets did consist primarily of grains for some portion of the year. From a survival standpoint low effort and especially low risk calories are really hard to ignore.

chrisco255 4y ago
There is nothing low effort about grains. They don't simply grow abundantly in nature without other animals eating them. In addition, before manual cultivation, wild, non selectively bred grains were nothing like modern grains.
- hinkley 4y ago
  We’ve forgotten how many cultures ate acorns when they were available. Acorns are about 40% carbs. Unlike apples and many other tree nuts, there’s not a lot of evidence they have been selectively bred for larger fruits. “Native” oaks produce a noteworthy amount of nuts. But the thing with nuts is that they have multi year cycles to break the foraging ladder. Every few years the whole forest produces five times as many seeds as in a normal year, and then famine and predation pulls the nut eating population back down. Only humans are clever enough to really exploit those patterns. A child would learn to make acorn bread, but couldn’t count on it being available except for short periods and then every so many years. [edit to add] if memory serves, in the modern era we are down to some First Nations populations and Korea for cultures that still eat acorns regularly.
  - layer8 4y ago
    I believe the paleo crowd doesn’t argue against nuts.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      Yes, but, acorns stand out as one of the starchiest nuts, which is why they make bread out of it. A modern walnut for instance is about 18g of fat, 4 of protein, and 4 of carbs per ounce. And while the size of the fruit would have been increased under cultivation, I'm not sure the mix of nutrients would have shifted all that far. A 'modern' acorn is 6.8:1.7:11.5. That is a starch. The limiting factor with acorns is that if you eat them raw the tannins will get you. You have to soak it out before eating them. We've had pottery for at least twice as long as the time since the end of the Paleolithic era. If soaked in leather bags or nets, then much older than that. And since oak tannins are one of the older techniques for processing leather, I think it's safe to say we've been collecting them since the back end of forever.

hinkley 4y ago

> that if it was rich enough for agriculture, or good for pastoralism, those lifestyles would have won out. Have you read Guns, Germs and Steel? Agriculture and Colonialism went together, club and hand, not fork and hand. Agriculture didn’t win so much as it conquered the world at spear point. I’ve even read a few feminist things recently that tie sexism to agriculture, one even claims that the plow is the worst thing to happen to women. That gives a much darker sentiment to “beating swords into plowshares”.

User23 4y ago
Guns, Germs, and Steel is thoroughly discredited pop science. And even then you’re misrepresenting its claims. Look to David Reich and his students for actual evidence based science on human migrations. And of course there are virtually no impartial contemporary works on the Age of Exploration, because the politics of our day require vilifying those civilizations. The objective reality is that the colonial period was just one of many human migrations. It wasn’t the worst, it wasn’t the first, it’s not the last, and there will be more, including the largest mass migrations in human history occurring right now.
- hinkley 4y ago
  How about 1491? He straight up claims the arrival of manioc in Africa contributed to a population boom that presaged the slave trade. Agricultural societies can subjugate conquered lands so much faster than hunter gatherer and nomadic peoples. It takes far longer to adapt to native food sources than to bring in annual crops that not only take but a few years to establish, but also require removing the forests and prairies of the defeated culture to do it. There is nothing for you here anymore. Assimilate to your new masters. Also if anyone has refuted that patterns of conquest around the world have been highly amplified in east-west bands because of the biomes those territories represent, I’d love to hear it.
  - throwaway8582 4y ago
    > Agricultural societies can subjugate conquered lands so much faster than hunter gatherer and nomadic peoples. Nomadic people are quite capable of conquering land, the most obvious example being Genghis Khan, who managed to build the Mongol empire into the largest in human history. It is true there is a general trend in history of agricultural societies displacing hunter/gather societies, but that's simply because agriculture generates more calories per square kilometer than a hunter/gatherer lifestyle. As populations grow beyond the carrying capacity of the natural environment, hunter/gatherers either forced to adopt agriculture or get conquered by the larger armies of those people that have.

guerrilla 4y ago

> the harsh truth of human existence being that if it was rich enough for agriculture, or good for pastoralism, those lifestyles would have won out. I don't buy this explanation at all. You could say the exact opposite: their land provides so well that they don't need to. I'm find with not knowing which, that's up to scientists who actually study that; not something that can be deduced a priori.

jbotz 4y ago
I think you're missing the point... agriculture allows for greater population density and specialization, which makes armies possible (not to mention technology leading to superior armaments), which in turn means that when the two enter into conflict, the militarized agricultural society wins. It's not a value judgement about which lifestyle is better, but if hunter-gatherers live on land that's good for agriculture, then eventually an agricultural society will want that land, and the rest is history. This old story is still playing out today, with the very few hunter-gatherers remaining being wiped out as we speak.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  I think you're missing the point... the only reason you'd need any of that is if it were useful to you. If your environment provides everything you need, then it isn't. Everything you describe needs to be driven by needs. If those needs don't exist because all wants are satisfied in such a society, then there's no push or pull to do all of that. I think you're basing your comment on the assumption that they're missing out on something, but this is exactly what I'm challenging. If you wanted to convince me, you'd have to establish without a doubt that they do have the shit land and that they live in poverty and don't get what they need and are completely marginalized; however, that's far from what I've seen in documentations about them (ignoring notable exceptions.)

AlotOfReading 4y ago

Evidence for eating anything we could get our hands on, including quite a bit of meat, is abundant in paleoarchaeology. This is quite far from the truth. The hadza are specific about the foods they gather and are known to have a number of food taboos. Women and children are forbidden from eating hearts, for example, while men can't eat tortoises. Also, the carbs in the title are primarily coming from tubers, often called underground storage organs (USOs) in the literature. Grain is a much later thing, as you mentioned. The thing you're critiquing is ethnographic analogy. The sucks doesn't do a good job of clarifying this, but the accepted modern usage is not to say "this is exactly how ancient humans lived", but rather to illuminate a small part of the spectrum of possible lifeways and what constraints they might have been optimizing.

r_hoods_ghost 4y ago

"What no one ate as much of is grains, specifically ground grains." From the article... "Recently, there’s been some really cool work looking at the little bit of plaque and calculus stuck to the teeth in fossilized hominids. If you look at that, you’ll find remains of plants and starches. So we actually do have preserved evidence that early humans are eating lots of starchy vegetable foods. There’s even some evidence of a primitive flourlike substance that’s made out of grains. That kind of thing is anathema to most Paleo diets, which say that you can’t eat grains because grains are a farmed food." Can't have evidence mucking up your belief system eh?

Slava_Propanei 4y ago
Root vegetables are not grains.
samatman 4y ago
The only evidence this provides is that you can't understand plain English at the sophomore reading level. Or you choose not to, specifically to be aggressive and rude, which is worse.