Read Online Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live by Marlene Zuk - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Marlene Zuk
Ads: Link
manage their fields with fertilizers and use them full-time. They also use more sophisticated tools, though these may simply be animal-drawn plows, not engine-powered cultivators. Crops are raised not only for eating by those who cultivate them, but for sale, which means that people can live in larger groups, with a division of labor between those who do the growing and those who buy or trade for the produce. That division of labor in turn means that resources—food itself or the means to purchase it—are not always divided equally, and society can become stratified.
Other than providing points of discussion to anthropologists, why do these distinctions matter? They matter because it is easier to accuse Monsanto-like agribusiness of causing widespread obesity and hypertension than it is to do the same thing to a few dozen people scrabbling in the ground for tubers using pointed sticks. And small-scale agriculture may have been around a great deal longer than people think; we are only now discovering that even the manly Neandertals had grain fragments between their teeth, and that early humans ground grains into flour, as I discuss in more detail in Chapter 5.
All of these gradations make it difficult to determine exactly when the woes associated with the shift to agriculture—increased levels of infectious diseases, reliance on one or a few food sources—first appeared. As archaeologist Tim Denham and his colleagues point out, “Early agriculture is not a demarcated ‘all or nothing’ lifestyle that can be clearly mapped across space and tracked through time.” 11 As with all other processes in evolution, the move to a different way of obtaining food came about in fits and starts, with some human traits adapting well to the changes and others not so much. This irregular but realistic progression of events makes Cordain’s contention that “the Paleo Diet is the one and only diet that ideally fits our genetic makeup. Just 500 generations ago—and for 2.5 million years before that—every human on Earth ate this way” 12 a little suspect.
This is not to deny the changes that took place as agriculture—intensive or otherwise—became established. Most obviously, the human diet changed to include and eventually depend on crops such as wheat, rice, and other grains, which meant that larger populations could be supported in one place. It also meant that the relative proportions of carbohydrates and proteins in the diet shifted toward the more reliable starches, though exactly how much is uncertain. Recent evidence from Neandertals and other fossils suggests, for example, that early humans may have eaten, and even processed, grain foods much earlier than had been supposed. Nevertheless, postagricultural diets not only relied more on carbohydrates, but were far less variable than the diets of hunter-gatherers. Estimates of the number of different kinds of plants eaten by many hunter-gatherer groups range from 50 to over 100, depending on the location of the population. Nowadays, in contrast, according to David Harris of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, “a mere 30 crops account for 95% of plant-derived energy in the human food supply, over half of which is provided by maize, rice and wheat.” 13
Why might reducing the number of foods we eat be a bad thing? Eating a varied diet is not necessarily inherently virtuous, though certain micronutrients are probably best obtained from a variety of foods. But a varied set of crops does provide a cushion against some kinds of food shortages, in a not-putting-all-your-grains-in-one-basket way. The Irish potato famine, for example, came about because a fungal disease wiped out the potato crop that the peasants of Ireland relied on for most of their caloric needs. The disease, in turn, was able to have such devastating effects because almost all the potatoes had been selected to be genetically uniform, with the size, shape, and flavor that made them
Other than providing points of discussion to anthropologists, why do these distinctions matter? They matter because it is easier to accuse Monsanto-like agribusiness of causing widespread obesity and hypertension than it is to do the same thing to a few dozen people scrabbling in the ground for tubers using pointed sticks. And small-scale agriculture may have been around a great deal longer than people think; we are only now discovering that even the manly Neandertals had grain fragments between their teeth, and that early humans ground grains into flour, as I discuss in more detail in Chapter 5.
All of these gradations make it difficult to determine exactly when the woes associated with the shift to agriculture—increased levels of infectious diseases, reliance on one or a few food sources—first appeared. As archaeologist Tim Denham and his colleagues point out, “Early agriculture is not a demarcated ‘all or nothing’ lifestyle that can be clearly mapped across space and tracked through time.” 11 As with all other processes in evolution, the move to a different way of obtaining food came about in fits and starts, with some human traits adapting well to the changes and others not so much. This irregular but realistic progression of events makes Cordain’s contention that “the Paleo Diet is the one and only diet that ideally fits our genetic makeup. Just 500 generations ago—and for 2.5 million years before that—every human on Earth ate this way” 12 a little suspect.
This is not to deny the changes that took place as agriculture—intensive or otherwise—became established. Most obviously, the human diet changed to include and eventually depend on crops such as wheat, rice, and other grains, which meant that larger populations could be supported in one place. It also meant that the relative proportions of carbohydrates and proteins in the diet shifted toward the more reliable starches, though exactly how much is uncertain. Recent evidence from Neandertals and other fossils suggests, for example, that early humans may have eaten, and even processed, grain foods much earlier than had been supposed. Nevertheless, postagricultural diets not only relied more on carbohydrates, but were far less variable than the diets of hunter-gatherers. Estimates of the number of different kinds of plants eaten by many hunter-gatherer groups range from 50 to over 100, depending on the location of the population. Nowadays, in contrast, according to David Harris of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, “a mere 30 crops account for 95% of plant-derived energy in the human food supply, over half of which is provided by maize, rice and wheat.” 13
Why might reducing the number of foods we eat be a bad thing? Eating a varied diet is not necessarily inherently virtuous, though certain micronutrients are probably best obtained from a variety of foods. But a varied set of crops does provide a cushion against some kinds of food shortages, in a not-putting-all-your-grains-in-one-basket way. The Irish potato famine, for example, came about because a fungal disease wiped out the potato crop that the peasants of Ireland relied on for most of their caloric needs. The disease, in turn, was able to have such devastating effects because almost all the potatoes had been selected to be genetically uniform, with the size, shape, and flavor that made them
Similar Books
