What Foods Do Humans Eat That Other Animals Can't
Top row: escargots, sardines, and fava beans (Crete); naan in salty yak-milk tea (Transitional islamic state of afghanistan); fried geranium leaves (Crete); boiled crab (Malaysia); raw beetroot and oranges (Crete); chapati, yak butter, and rock salt (Pakistan). Centre row: dried-apricot soup (Pakistan); boiled plantains (Bolivia); fried coral reef fish (Malaysia); bulgur, boiled eggs, and parsley (Tajikistan); stewed-seaweed salad (Malaysia); boiled ptarmigan (Greenland). Lesser row: grilled tuna (Malaysia); cooked potatoes, tomatoes, and fava beans in olive oil (Crete); rice with melted yak butter (Afghanistan); fried fish with tamarind (Malaysia); dried apricots (Pakistan); grilled impala (Tanzania; photographer'due south utensils shown).
Cultures effectually the world have centuries-erstwhile food traditions, as seen in these dishes from several different populations.
The Evolution of Diet
Some experts say modern humans should eat from a Stone Historic period card. What's on it may surprise you.
Fundamental Feasts For some cultures, eating off the state is—and e'er has been—a style of life.
It's suppertime in the Amazon of lowland Bolivia, and Ana Cuata Maito is stirring a porridge of plantains and sweet manioc over a fire smoldering on the dirt floor of her thatched hut, listening for the voice of her married man as he returns from the forest with his scrawny hunting dog.
With an infant daughter nursing at her breast and a seven-year-old boy tugging at her sleeve, she looks spent when she tells me that she hopes her husband, Deonicio Nate, volition bring home meat tonight. "The children are sad when there is no meat," Maito says through an interpreter, as she swats away mosquitoes.
Nate left before dawn on this mean solar day in January with his rifle and machete to become an early first on the two-hour trek to the old-growth forest. There he silently scanned the canopy for dark-brown capuchin monkeys and raccoonlike coatis, while his dog sniffed the ground for the aroma of piglike peccaries or cherry-red brown capybaras. If he was lucky, Nate would spot i of the biggest packets of meat in the forest—tapirs, with long, prehensile snouts that comb for buds and shoots among the clammy ferns.
This night, however, Nate emerges from the wood with no meat. At 39, he'due south an energetic guy who doesn't seem easily defeated—when he isn't hunting or angling or weaving palm fronds into roof panels, he's in the woods carving a new canoe from a log. But when he finally sits down to eat his porridge from a metal bowl, he complains that it'due south hard to go plenty meat for his family: two wives (not uncommon in the tribe) and 12 children. Loggers are scaring away the animals. He can't fish on the river because a storm washed away his canoe.
The story is similar for each of the families I visit in Anachere, a customs of about 90 members of the ancient Tsimane Indian tribe. It's the rainy flavor, when information technology'south hardest to chase or fish. More than fifteen,000 Tsimane live in almost a hundred villages along two rivers in the Amazon Basin near the main market place boondocks of San Borja, 225 miles from La Paz. But Anachere is a two-day trip from San Borja by motorized dugout canoe, and then the Tsimane living in that location even so get well-nigh of their food from the forest, the river, or their gardens.
I'm traveling with Asher Rosinger, a doctoral candidate who's part of a team, co-led past biological anthropologist William Leonard of Northwestern Academy, studying the Tsimane to certificate what a pelting forest diet looks like. They're specially interested in how the Indians' health changes as they move abroad from their traditional diet and active lifestyle and begin trading forest goods for sugar, table salt, rice, oil, and increasingly, dried meat and canned sardines. This is not a purely academic research. What anthropologists are learning about the diets of ethnic peoples similar the Tsimane could inform what the balance of us should eat.
Rosinger introduces me to a villager named José Mayer Cunay, 78, who, with his son Felipe Mayer Lero, 39, has planted a lush garden past the river over the past 30 years. José leads us downwards a trail by trees laden with golden papayas and mangoes, clusters of green plantains, and orbs of grapefruit that dangle from branches like earrings. Vibrant red "lobster claw" heliconia flowers and wild ginger grow like weeds among stalks of corn and sugarcane. "José'due south family has more fruit than anyone," says Rosinger.
Nevertheless in the family unit's open up-air shelter Felipe's married woman, Catalina, is preparing the same banal porridge as other households. When I ask if the food in the garden can tide them over when there's fiddling meat, Felipe shakes his head. "Information technology's not plenty to live on," he says. "I demand to hunt and fish. My body doesn't want to eat just these plants."
The Tsimane of Bolivia get most of their food from the river, the forest, or fields and gardens carved out of the forest.
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Equally we wait to 2050, when we'll need to feed two billion more than people, the question of which diet is best has taken on new urgency. The foods nosotros cull to consume in the coming decades will have dramatic ramifications for the planet. Simply put, a diet that revolves around meat and dairy, a manner of eating that's on the rise throughout the developing world, will have a greater toll on the world's resources than 1 that revolves effectually unrefined grains, nuts, fruits, and vegetables.
Until agriculture was developed effectually 10,000 years ago, all humans got their food past hunting, gathering, and fishing. Equally farming emerged, nomadic hunter-gatherers gradually were pushed off prime farmland, and somewhen they became express to the forests of the Amazon, the arid grasslands of Africa, the remote islands of Southeast Asia, and the tundra of the Arctic. Today just a few scattered tribes of hunter-gatherers remain on the planet.
That'southward why scientists are intensifying efforts to larn what they can nigh an ancient diet and way of life before they disappear. "Hunter-gatherers are not living fossils," says Alyssa Crittenden, a nutritional anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies the diet of Tanzania'southward Hadza people, some of the concluding truthful hunter-gatherers. "That being said, nosotros accept a small scattering of foraging populations that remain on the planet. We are running out of time. If we desire to glean whatever information on what a nomadic, foraging lifestyle looks like, we demand to capture their nutrition now."
So far studies of foragers similar the Tsimane, Chill Inuit, and Hadza accept found that these peoples traditionally didn't develop high claret pressure, atherosclerosis, or cardiovascular disease. "A lot of people believe in that location is a discordance betwixt what we eat today and what our ancestors evolved to eat," says paleoanthropologist Peter Ungar of the University of Arkansas. The notion that we're trapped in Stone Age bodies in a fast-food globe is driving the current craze for Paleolithic diets. The popularity of these so-called caveman or Rock Age diets is based on the idea that modern humans evolved to swallow the way hunter-gatherers did during the Paleolithic—the catamenia from about 2.half dozen one thousand thousand years ago to the start of the agronomical revolution—and that our genes oasis't had enough time to suit to farmed foods.
A Stone Age diet "is the 1 and only diet that ideally fits our genetic makeup," writes Loren Cordain, an evolutionary nutritionist at Colorado Country University, in his book The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Salubrious past Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Swallow. After studying the diets of living hunter-gatherers and terminal that 73 percent of these societies derived more than half their calories from meat, Cordain came upward with his own Paleo prescription: Consume enough of lean meat and fish but not dairy products, beans, or cereal grains—foods introduced into our diet after the invention of cooking and agriculture. Paleo-diet advocates like Cordain say that if we stick to the foods our hunter-gatherer ancestors one time ate, we tin avoid the diseases of civilization, such equally middle disease, high blood pressure level, diabetes, cancer, fifty-fifty acne.
That sounds appealing. Only is information technology true that we all evolved to eat a meat-axial diet? Both paleontologists studying the fossils of our ancestors and anthropologists documenting the diets of indigenous people today say the picture is a bit more than complicated. The popular cover of a Paleo diet, Ungar and others point out, is based on a stew of misconceptions.
The Hadza of Tanzania are the world'southward last full-time hunter-gatherers. They live on what they notice: game, honey, and plants, including tubers, berries, and baobab fruit.
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Meat has played a starring role in the evolution of the homo diet. Raymond Dart, who in 1924 discovered the offset fossil of a human ancestor in Africa, popularized the paradigm of our early on ancestors hunting meat to survive on the African savanna. Writing in the 1950s, he described those humans every bit "carnivorous creatures, that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death … slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot claret of victims and greedily devouring livid writhing flesh."
Eating meat is thought past some scientists to have been crucial to the evolution of our ancestors' larger brains about ii million years agone. By starting to eat calorie-dense meat and marrow instead of the low-quality plant diet of apes, our directly ancestor, Homo erectus, took in enough extra energy at each meal to help fuel a bigger brain. Digesting a higher quality diet and less bulky plant fiber would have allowed these humans to have much smaller guts. The energy freed up as a result of smaller guts could be used past the greedy encephalon, according to Leslie Aiello, who beginning proposed the idea with paleoanthropologist Peter Wheeler. The brain requires 20 per centum of a human'due south energy when resting; past comparison, an ape's encephalon requires only 8 percentage. This means that from the time of H. erectus, the human body has depended on a diet of energy-dense food—specially meat.
Fast-frontward a couple of 1000000 years to when the homo nutrition took another major turn with the invention of agriculture. The domestication of grains such as sorghum, barley, wheat, corn, and rice created a plentiful and anticipated food supply, allowing farmers' wives to bear babies in rapid succession—one every 2.5 years instead of one every 3.v years for hunter-gatherers. A population explosion followed; earlier long, farmers outnumbered foragers.
Over the past decade anthropologists have struggled to answer central questions about this transition. Was agriculture a clear step frontwards for human health? Or in leaving backside our hunter-gatherer means to grow crops and raise livestock, did nosotros give up a healthier diet and stronger bodies in exchange for food security?
When biological anthropologist Clark Spencer Larsen of Ohio State University describes the dawn of agriculture, it's a grim picture. Every bit the earliest farmers became dependent on crops, their diets became far less nutritionally various than hunter-gatherers' diets. Eating the same domesticated grain every day gave early farmers cavities and periodontal disease rarely institute in hunter-gatherers, says Larsen. When farmers began domesticating animals, those cattle, sheep, and goats became sources of milk and meat simply besides of parasites and new infectious diseases. Farmers suffered from atomic number 26 deficiency and developmental delays, and they shrank in stature.
Despite boosting population numbers, the lifestyle and diet of farmers were clearly non as healthy as the lifestyle and diet of hunter-gatherers. That farmers produced more babies, Larsen says, is simply evidence that "you don't accept to be disease free to take children."
The Inuit of Greenland survived for generations eating almost nada but meat in a landscape too harsh for most plants. Today markets offer more variety, but a taste for meat persists.
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The existent Paleolithic diet, though, wasn't all meat and marrow. It's true that hunter-gatherers around the world require meat more than than any other food and usually get around xxx percent of their annual calories from animals. But nearly too endure lean times when they swallow less than a handful of meat each week. New studies suggest that more than a reliance on meat in ancient man diets fueled the brain's expansion.
Yr-round observations ostend that hunter-gatherers oftentimes accept dismal success as hunters. The Hadza and Kung bushmen of Africa, for case, fail to get meat more than one-half the time when they venture along with bows and arrows. This suggests it was even harder for our ancestors who didn't take these weapons. "Everybody thinks you wander out into the savanna and there are antelopes everywhere, just waiting for yous to bonk them on the caput," says paleoanthropologist Alison Brooks of George Washington University, an expert on the Dobe Kung of Republic of botswana. No one eats meat all that oftentimes, except in the Arctic, where Inuit and other groups traditionally got every bit much equally 99 per centum of their calories from seals, narwhals, and fish.
So how practise hunter-gatherers get free energy when at that place's no meat? It turns out that "man the hunter" is backed up past "woman the forager," who, with some help from children, provides more calories during hard times. When meat, fruit, or honey is deficient, foragers depend on "fallback foods," says Brooks. The Hadza get almost 70 percent of their calories from plants. The Kung traditionally rely on tubers and mongongo nuts, the Aka and Baka Pygmies of the Congo River Basin on yams, the Tsimane and Yanomami Indians of the Amazon on plantains and manioc, the Australian Aboriginals on nut grass and water chestnuts.
"In that location's been a consistent story nigh hunting defining us and that meat made us human," says Amanda Henry, a paleobiologist at the Max Planck Plant for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. "Frankly, I think that misses half of the story. They desire meat, sure. But what they really live on is plant foods." What's more, she found starch granules from plants on fossil teeth and stone tools, which suggests humans may accept been eating grains, likewise as tubers, for at least 100,000 years—long plenty to take evolved the ability to tolerate them.
The notion that we stopped evolving in the Paleolithic period just isn't true. Our teeth, jaws, and faces have gotten smaller, and our Dna has inverse since the invention of agriculture. "Are humans nonetheless evolving? Yeah!" says geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania.
I hit piece of show is lactose tolerance. All humans digest mother'due south milk as infants, but until cattle began being domesticated ten,000 years ago, weaned children no longer needed to digest milk. Every bit a result, they stopped making the enzyme lactase, which breaks down the lactose into unproblematic sugars. Later humans began herding cattle, it became tremendously advantageous to digest milk, and lactose tolerance evolved independently among cattle herders in Europe, the Middle Due east, and Africa. Groups not dependent on cattle, such as the Chinese and Thai, the Pima Indians of the American Southwest, and the Bantu of West Africa, remain lactose intolerant.
Humans besides vary in their ability to extract sugars from starchy foods as they chew them, depending on how many copies of a sure gene they inherit. Populations that traditionally ate more starchy foods, such as the Hadza, take more copies of the gene than the Yakut meat-eaters of Siberia, and their saliva helps intermission down starches before the food reaches their stomachs.
These examples suggest a twist on "Yous are what y'all eat." More accurately, you are what your ancestors ate. At that place is tremendous variation in what foods humans can thrive on, depending on genetic inheritance. Traditional diets today include the vegetarian regimen of India's Jains, the meat-intensive fare of Inuit, and the fish-heavy diet of Malaysia'due south Bajau people. The Nochmani of the Nicobar Islands off the coast of India become by on poly peptide from insects. "What makes the states human is our ability to discover a meal in virtually whatsoever environs," says the Tsimane study co-leader Leonard.
Studies suggest that ethnic groups get into trouble when they abandon their traditional diets and agile lifestyles for Western living. Diabetes was virtually unknown, for instance, among the Maya of Key America until the 1950s. As they've switched to a Western diet high in sugars, the rate of diabetes has skyrocketed. Siberian nomads such every bit the Evenk reindeer herders and the Yakut ate diets heavy in meat, yet they had almost no heart disease until after the fall of the Soviet Union, when many settled in towns and began eating market foods. Today about half the Yakut living in villages are overweight, and almost a third have hypertension, says Leonard. And Tsimane people who eat market foods are more prone to diabetes than those who still rely on hunting and gathering.
For those of u.s.a. whose ancestors were adapted to establish-based diets—and who take desk-bound jobs—it might be best not to consume as much meat equally the Yakut. Contempo studies confirm older findings that although humans have eaten red meat for two million years, heavy consumption increases atherosclerosis and cancer in most populations—and the culprit isn't just saturated fat or cholesterol. Our gut bacteria digest a food in meat called L-carnitine. In i mouse written report, digestion of Fifty-carnitine additional artery-clogging plaque. Research also has shown that the human allowed arrangement attacks a sugar in cerise meat that's called Neu5Gc, causing inflammation that's low level in the immature but that eventually could cause cancer. "Reddish meat is great, if you want to live to 45," says Ajit Varki of the University of California, San Diego, lead writer of the Neu5Gc study.
Many paleoanthropologists say that although advocates of the mod Paleolithic nutrition urge the states to stay away from unhealthy processed foods, the diet'south heavy focus on meat doesn't replicate the diverseness of foods that our ancestors ate—or take into account the agile lifestyles that protected them from heart disease and diabetes. "What bothers a lot of paleoanthropologists is that nosotros actually didn't have only one caveman diet," says Leslie Aiello, president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in New York City. "The homo diet goes back at least two million years. We had a lot of cavemen out at that place."
In other words, in that location is no i ideal human diet. Aiello and Leonard say the existent hallmark of being human isn't our sense of taste for meat merely our ability to adapt to many habitats—and to exist able to combine many dissimilar foods to create many healthy diets. Unfortunately the modernistic Western diet does not appear to be one of them.
The Bajau of Malaysia fish and dive for near everything they consume. Some alive in houses on the embankment or on stilts; others have no homes simply their boats.
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The latest clue as to why our modern diet may be making the states sick comes from Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham, who argues that the biggest revolution in the human diet came not when nosotros started to swallow meat but when we learned to cook. Our homo ancestors who began cooking sometime between 1.viii 1000000 and 400,000 years ago probably had more children who thrived, Wrangham says. Pounding and heating food "predigests" it, so our guts spend less energy breaking it down, absorb more than than if the food were raw, and thus excerpt more fuel for our brains. "Cooking produces soft, energy-rich foods," says Wrangham. Today nosotros tin can't survive on raw, unprocessed nutrient alone, he says. We have evolved to depend upon cooked food.
To examination his ideas, Wrangham and his students fed raw and cooked nutrient to rats and mice. When I visited Wrangham'south lab at Harvard, his then graduate student, Rachel Carmody, opened the door of a modest fridge to show me plastic bags filled with meat and sugariness potatoes, some raw and some cooked. Mice raised on cooked foods gained fifteen to twoscore percent more weight than mice raised only on raw food.
If Wrangham is right, cooking non merely gave early humans the free energy they needed to build bigger brains but also helped them become more than calories from food so that they could gain weight. In the modern context the flip side of his hypothesis is that we may be victims of our ain success. Nosotros have gotten so good at processing foods that for the first fourth dimension in human development, many humans are getting more calories than they burn in a day. "Rough breads have given style to Twinkies, apples to apple juice," he writes. "Nosotros need to go more aware of the calorie-raising consequences of a highly processed nutrition."
It'southward this shift to candy foods, taking place all over the globe, that's contributing to a rising epidemic of obesity and related diseases. If about of the world ate more local fruits and vegetables, a petty meat, fish, and some whole grains (as in the highly touted Mediterranean diet), and exercised an hour a day, that would be good news for our health—and for the planet.
The Kyrgyz of the Pamir Mountains in northern Afghanistan alive at a high altitude where no crops abound. Survival depends on the animals that they milk, butcher, and castling.
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On my terminal afternoon visiting the Tsimane in Anachere, ane of Deonicio Nate'south daughters, Albania, xiii, tells us that her begetter and half-brother Alberto, 16, are back from hunting and that they've got something. We follow her to the cooking hut and smell the animals before we meet them—iii raccoonlike coatis accept been laid beyond the fire, fur and all. As the fire singes the coatis' striped pelts, Albania and her sister, Emiliana, 12, scrape off fur until the animals' flesh is bare. Then they accept the carcasses to a stream to clean and ready them for roasting.
Nate'southward wives are cleaning two armadillos as well, preparing to cook them in a stew with shredded plantains. Nate sits past the fire, describing a bye'south chase. First he shot the armadillos every bit they napped past a stream. Then his domestic dog spotted a pack of coatis and chased them, killing two as the residue darted up a tree. Alberto fired his shotgun but missed. He fired again and hit a coati. Iii coatis and two armadillos were enough, so father and son packed up and headed abode.
As family members relish the feast, I watch their lilliputian male child, Alfonso, who had been sick all calendar week. He is dancing around the fire, happily chewing on a cooked slice of coati tail. Nate looks pleased. This evening in Anachere, far from the diet debates, there is meat, and that is good.
The people of Crete, the largest of the Greek islands, swallow a rich diverseness of foods fatigued from their groves and farms and the sea. They lived on a so-chosen Mediterranean diet long earlier it became a fad.
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Ann Gibbons is the author of The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Primeval Ancestors. Matthieu Paley photographed Afghanistan's Kyrgyz for our Feb 2013 result.
The magazine thanks The Rockefeller Foundation and members of the National Geographic Lodge for their generous support of this serial of articles.
Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/evolution-of-diet/
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