December 17, 2009
Caveman Cereal Raises a Question: Do Humans Need Grains?
According to an article in the latest issue of Science, our ancestors may have been more sophisticated eaters than we’ve been giving them credit for.
Sorghum field in Zimbabwe, courtesy Flickr user 2E0MCA
After analyzing starch residue on dozens of ancient stone tools found in a cave in Mozambique, archaeologist Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary came to a surprising conclusion. The residue was sorghum, a wild cereal grain. Previous archaeological evidence has suggested that grains entered the human diet perhaps 23,000 years ago (and grain storage started more recently, around 11,000 years ago).
But these tools were about 105,000 years old!
A snippet from the press release:
“These residues could have come from wild sorghum and imply that the site’s inhabitants were consuming this grain, in contrast to the conventional assumption that seed collecting was not an important activity among the Pleistocene foragers of southern Africa.”
Looking up more information about this, I came across several blogs and online discussions that ask a question I’ve never considered: Do we need to eat grains at all?
Interestingly, many of those who argue that we don’t need grains (or should only eat them sparingly) are influenced by something called The Paleo Diet, which “encourages dieters to replace dairy and grain products with fresh fruits and vegetables—foods that are more nutritious than whole grains or dairy products.”
Here’s the premise of that diet:
During the Paleolithic, we evolved a specific genome that has only changed approximately 0.01 per cent in these last 10,000 years. However, during this recent time span mass agriculture, grains/grain products, sugars/sugar products, dairy/dairy products, and a plethora of processed foods have all been introduced as a regular part of the human diet. We are not eating the foods we are genetically and physiologically adapted to eat (99.9% of our genetic profile is still Paleolithic); and the discordance is an underlying cause for much of the “diseases of civilization.”
I’ll be interested to see if this evidence of early sorghum consumption changes anything for Paleo Diet proponents. The new finding certainly seems to counter the idea that eating grains isn’t “natural” because it only started relatively recently.
As usual, I’d like to know what you think…
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We don’t need meat, we don’t need cereal grains, we desperately need vegetables and fruits of all sorts.
The so called Paleo Diet should be called the Wacko Diet because the only people I have ever met who insist they can’t eat dairy, wheat, grains and oats are people are obsessive compulsive to begin with. The sooner the Darwin effect removes them from the food chain the better.
I feel most healthy when I have more fruits and vegetables in my diet. I love to eat meat, chicken and fish too.
I think the Paleo diet is interesting, and perhaps appropriate/desirable. I don’t adhere to it, but I do find my weight a bit easier to control when I limit consumption of pasta and bread. I don’t have to limit meat and vegetables in the same way.
I’ll believe the Paleo diet when I see someone successfully doing it *thoroughly*. By that theory we don’t need houses, clothes, much in the way of cooked food, variety in our diet (hunter gatherers tend to have a lot of a very few things at a time), medicine, AC (in southern Africa!), or central heat. Apparently women don’t need teeth, either, because that’s what pregnant women lose if they don’t have a source of calcium in their diet.
It’s not just about genes. It’s also about the expression of those genes. There have been physical changes since then, for example our skull bones are much thinner than the paleo ancestors.
99.9% of our genome may be the same, but something like 98% of our genome is the same as our nearest primate ancestors. A little difference matters!
[...] take on that 100,000 year-old sorghum story. Will it change what the Palaeo diet people [...]
[...] Amanda wrote about the recent discovery of evidence that humans may have started eating cereal grains tens of [...]
The idea that there was one single “Paleo Diet” is nonsense on the face of it. Foraging people everywhere ate what was available to them. If you lived in the plains, you ate lots of meat. If you lived at the shore, you ate tons of shellfish. If you lived in the jungle, mostly plants.
This is fascinating stuff. My take on grains vs. vegetables and fruits is that we can eat all of them–but be moderate, particularly with the former. I don’t think I could ever give up fresh-baked bread, but I can try not to scarf it down at once!
Paleo diet, was only good for hunters at that time. They were out ALL day EXERCISING, so they sure did burn all the fat they got from the meat, and sure thing they needed it.
However in today’s society, this is nonsense. If I ever hear anyone tell me they’re on a Paleo diet plan (unless they’re Eskimos), I will slap some sense right onto their face.
Cheers
I eat plant foods of all kinds. I eat some grains, but not a whole lot. I always eat whole grains though. I think it’s a bit extreme to completely avoid them based on some theory. And just because our ancestors ate meat, that doesn’t mean we should. There’s nothing natural about factory farms and slaughter houses. They’re evil.
I think the more active we are the more grains we need to fuel. However our society is not as near as active as the first men were, actively hunting food, gathering food, on constant move without cars. We are more sedentary and because of such the grain intake is killing us, increased diabetes, obesity, heart disease, etc.