The longer the canal, the more area over which digestion can occur. But while most canals take the shortest course between two points, the one inside you takes the longest. It takes you from the mouth through the body all the way down to the anus. This canal is the most important and least lovely waterway on Earth. What I really mean is the alimentary canal and all of its gurgling bells and whistles. I should start by explaining what the “gut” is and does I use the term too loosely. The closest (albeit imperfect) proxies for our ancestral guts are to be found coiled inside the living bodies of monkeys and apes. In addition to understanding early humans and other hominids, we need to understand the diet of our ancestors during the times when the main features of our guts, and their magical abilities to turn food into life, evolved. But if we want to return to the diet our guts and bodies “evolved to deal with” (a concept that wrongly assumes our bodies are fine tuned by engineers rather than cobbled together by natural selection), perhaps we should also be looking our earlier ancestors. But why do we choose these particular ancestors as starting points? They do seem tough and admirable in a really strong five o’ clock shadow sort of way. I want to eat like Homo erectus or a Neanderthal or a stone age human, my neighbors testify. When we talk about “paleo” diets, we arbitrarily tend to start with one set of ancestors, our most recent ones. The resolutions come, in part, from considering the question of our diets in a broader evolutionary context. Fortunately, new research suggests answers (yes, plural) to the question of what our ancestors ate. In other words, athough “Paleolithic” diets in diet books tend to be very meaty, reasonable minds disagree as to whether ancient, Paleolithic diets actually were. Meanwhile, more macho camps of academics paint a picture of our ancestors as big, bad, hunters, who supplemented meaty diets with the occasional berry “chaser.” Others suggest we spent much of our recent past scavenging what the lions left behind, running in to snag a half-rotten wildebeest leg when the fates allowed. A paper out just this month suggests that even Neanderthals–our north country cousins and mates– may have eaten much more plant material than previously suspected. If you listen to one camp, our ancestors got most of their nutrition from gathered fruits and nuts successful kills of big mammals may have been more of a treat than an everyday reality. Even if we just consider our stone age ancestors-those folks whose stories span the time between the first stone tool and the first agriculture-the sides of the debate are polarized. Typically, they focus on our stone age (AKA Paleolithic) human ancestors or our earlier pre-human, hominid ancestors. Collectively, anthropologists have spent many a career attempting to hone in on the diets of our most recent ancestors. But let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that it would be a good idea to eat like our ancestors ate. The past was no panacea each generation we made due with the bodies and foods available, imperfect bodies and imperfect foods. After all, like all wild species, sometimes our ancestors starved to death and the starving to death diet, well, it ends badly. Taken too literally, such diets are ridiculous. Paleolithic diets, caveman diets, primal diets and the like, urge us to remember the good ole days. A new class of very popular self-help books recommends a return to the diets of our ancestors. Or maybe we should just eat the way our ancestors did. The time has come to return to a more sensible way of eating and living, but which way? One group of self-help books suggests we give up carbohydrates, another that we give up fats, another still that we lay off the protein. Our modern choices about what and how much to eat have gone terribly wrong. Collectively, we are overweight, sick and struggling. The other half just gave up on their diets and are on a binge. Right now, one half of all Americans are on a diet. Paleolithic diets have become all the rage, but are they getting our ancestral diet all wrong? Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians.
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