THROUGH THE LENS OF ANTHROPOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTION TO HUMAN EVOLUTION AND CULTURE122

BOX 6.1 Problems with “Palaeo”

There is a lot of interest in things “palaeo” these days. It is apparently a good marketing gimmick, feeding on people’s sense of the “good old days,” taken to the extreme. Thus, we hear of the palaeo lifestyle, the palaeo diet, palaeo exercise, palaeo sleeping patterns, palaeo medicine, palaeo this, and palaeo that. Some describe the interest as palaeo nostalgia. Anthropologists sometimes refer to it as palaeo fantasy.

There are problems with all things “palaeo.” These include a misunderstanding of what humans were like in the past, both biologically and culturally, and how we have evolved. Another problem is that the past is misused to support assumptions, often incorrect, about some kind of natural state of humans, including how we should eat, sleep, have sex, and exercise. Many assume that if it is older, it must be better, but this isn’t always true.

The very popular Paleo diet provides a good example. The first edition of The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat by Loren Cordain was published in 2002, and by 2011 had already sold more than 200,000 copies. Cordain describes the diet as

the diet to which our species is genetically

adapted. This is the diet of our hunter-gatherer

ancestors, the foods consumed by every human

being on the planet until a mere 333 human

generations ago, or about ten thousand years

ago. Our ancestors’ diets were uncomplicated

by agriculture, animal husbandry, technology,

and processed foods. Then, as today, our health

is optimized when we eat lean meats, seafood,

and fresh fruits and vegetables at the expense

of grains, dairy, refined sugars, refined oils and

processed foods. (p. xi)

Most anthropologists find this basic premise to be faulty. For archaeologists, the notion that

there was a common diet in prehistory is absurd, and research shows evidence of grains in the diet long before 10,000 years ago. The notion that we have not evolved biologically with changes in our diet is also problematic. Lactose tolerance (the ability to drink milk without ill effects), for exam-ple, has evolved in different ways (from different mutations) at least three times in various parts of the world over the past several thousand years. And before this, people were able to enjoy the many nutritional benefits of dairy by processing milk into cheese and yogurt (see Box 3.1).

Those who take the palaeo diet a step further and eat only raw food often do not fully understand life in the past. Cooking food is a cultural univer-sal, and probably has been for at least 30,000 years. Most archaeologists accept that cooking has been common for at least several hundred thousand years, and some suggest it may have originated about two million years ago (see Box 5.2). Cooking tends to enhance the nutrition of most foods, and makes digestion easier.

Marlene Zuk (2013), in Paleofantasy: What Evolution Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live, describes some of the problems with “paleo,” including how people often think that things were better in the past, and how adherents to the palaeo lifestyle often do not know what life was really like:

To think of ourselves as misfits in our own time

and of our own making flatly contradicts what

we now understand about the way evolution

works…. The paleofantasy is a fantasy in part

because it supposes that we humans, or at least

our protohuman forebears, were at some point

perfectly adapted to our environments. (pp. 6, 7)

Even assuming we could agree on a time to hark back to, there is the sticky issue of exactly what such an ancestral nirvana was like.

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