Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

salon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 199 posts

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#21

Post by a_bonobo »

graeme wrote: post #16
a_bonobo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds interesting! Do you have any proof for this statement: >there was a clear dip in human health once we entered the neolithic era This statement seems hard to prove seeing as we didn't keep any health-records between 10,000 BC and 2,000 BC (I can see, however, that we currently live quite unhealthy).

I do not know the literature well enough to cite anthropological studies. But as far as I understand it, this is a relatively uncontroversial claim within the field. Jared Diamond's article is a good introduction: http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html Edit: As others have mentioned below, the main evidence is a decline in the height, bone density and tooth health of skeletons of pre and post neolitic humans. Ave…

Thank you for these numbers!

It seems that some of the cited stuff is still too inconclusive to fully draw the conclusion farming -> decreased "body fitness", but there definitely seems to be some tendency there.

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#22

Post by awolf »

Zuk is attacking a straw man here. Thinking about our diets from an evolutionary perspective gives us a framework in which to form educated hypotheses. The way an intelligent person applies paleo-based thinking is by forming theories, not by creating an absolutist belief system. Zuk does nothing to invalidate the application data we have about the past in a logical fashion.

If Zuk's point is that some people are applying evolutionary concepts blindly without verifying results or considering evidence, then her book title should have been: "Some People Are Stupid" and left it at that. If she wants to launch a counter to the paleo movement then I think she's fallen flat on her face.

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#23

Post by ellyagg »

brd wrote: post #9

The biggest problem I have with Zuk is that the entire premise of this book is based on a straw man argument. The "Paleo" in paleo diet comes from the fact that there was a clear dip in human health once we entered the neolithic era (i.e. started farming). We are not emulating a caveman's diet per se, we are simply trying to find and remove what caused that original dip in health. To anyone uninformed about the paleo…

Indeed, it's a review by someone with an axe to grind about a book by someone with an axe to grind.

I'm not a "Paleo" person, but the hinting in this article that folks trying to infer better living patterns from the past are loons is faintly preposterous. We have just mounds of evidence (which doubters are free to research themselves) that many pre-Agricultural societies had (and have, actually) far lower rates of the so-called "diseases of civilizations". More abstractly, evolution isn't magic. There is some rate of lifestyle change due to technology that will outstrip evolution's ability to accommodate it.

Hunters and gatherers weren't obese. We are. By irrefutable inference, some lifestyle difference explains this. One valid way to approach the problem of our accelerating obesity is to study what has changed. The theory that I consider most likely at this point is the one argued by Stephan Guyenet, a PH.D. neurobiology researcher who studies the link between obesity and the brain. He posits that modern industrial food is hyperpalatable, so we eat too much of it.

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/10/case-for-food-...

It wouldn't be the favorite theory in the Paleo community, I imagine, but it springs from the same intuition.

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#24

Post by CleanedStar »

"It is striking how fixated on the alleged behavior of our hunting-and-foraging forbearers some educated inhabitants of the developed world have become....happier and healthier if we lived like 'cavemen'"

The posters on this web site who are not part of the "1%" are often at the top of the middle class under the 1%...white, male, American, educated at college in CS, living in nice metropolitan areas in the US. What kind of work hours do we often see posted here? 50, 60, 70 hour weeks, or more. I know, I have done so myself - working for a Fortune 100 company. Imagine what hours a truck driver, or a Bangladeshi factory worker works, or some Chinese factory worker making iPads.

In Marshall Sahlins "The Original Affluent Society" he looked at how much the still existing hunter-gatherers in places like Africa worked, and did research trying to figure out what was the case 20 thousand, 30 thousand years ago. It seems hunter-gatherers often work less hours than many of the people on this site do, or truck drivers do, or Chinese factory workers do, or a lot of people do.

They also have no rent payments to make and the like. Hunter-gatherers, pastoral tribes and farmers tend to have to get forced more or less by gunpoint to the cities, including in our modern day. Why should the rural Mexican farm laborers forced off their farms by "NAFTA" come to modern America, because the unemployment rate is no longer above the 1984-2009 high like it was last month?

As the desire of the current hegemony is to pretty much ignore history completely, of course any people who look at history from ancient history to now, you want to paint them as loonies. This writer sounds like one of the apes in Planet of the Apes deriding people who want to go to the forbidden zone. And sure, it's easy to deride anyone curious about history, the economy, politics and so forth, and to say anyone interested in that old stuff is some Berkeley hippie eating the latest fad diet. She's the secular equivalent of the Christian fundamentalists who say the world was created in 4004 BC.

A new thing was introduced into the world 10000 years ago alongside farming - slavery. Read the Epic of Gilgamesh, or the bible, or modern anthropology. The "left"/"post-left" investigation of these things is mostly serious. But if Salon sees fit to point to a few wingbat hippies eating some faddish diet as a way to paint the whole study with a brush, well, I'm not surprised the website John Warnock and William Hambrecht bankroll is doing that.

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#25

Post by jacalata »

brd wrote: post #9

The biggest problem I have with Zuk is that the entire premise of this book is based on a straw man argument. The "Paleo" in paleo diet comes from the fact that there was a clear dip in human health once we entered the neolithic era (i.e. started farming). We are not emulating a caveman's diet per se, we are simply trying to find and remove what caused that original dip in health. To anyone uninformed about the paleo…

google "The Paleo Diet", first result http://thepaleodiet.com/:

The Paleo Diet is based upon eating wholesome, contemporary foods from the food groups our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have thrived on during the Paleolithic era, the time period from about 2.6 million years ago to the beginning of the agricultural revolution, about 10,000 years ago. These foods include fresh meats (preferably grass-produced or free-ranging beef, pork, lamb, poultry, and game meat, if you can get it), fish, seafood, fresh fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, and healthful oils (olive, coconut, avocado, macadamia, walnut and flaxseed). Dairy products, cereal grains, legumes, refined sugars and processed foods were not part of our ancestral menu. The site makes constant references to "the mainstays of Stone Age diets" and advocates a high potassium/sodium ratio because "Stone Age bodies were adapted to this".

Another site early in the results: "Cut out all cereal grains and legumes, cut out sugar, eliminate dairy products" which I think covers everything outside of meat, fruit and vegetables.

PaleoDiet.com: "Paleo is a simple dietary lifestyle that is based on foods being either in or out. In are the Paleolithic Era foods that we ate prior to agriculture and animal husbandry (meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, tree nuts, vegetables, roots, fruit, berries, mushrooms, etc.). Out are Neolithic Era foods that result from agriculture or animal husbandry (grains, dairy, beans/legumes, potatoes, sugar and fake foods) "

If you object to people rebutting this 'straw man', then perhaps you should try and stop people from proposing it. You can't call something a straw man simply because it's not what you personally mean by the word.

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#26

Post by michaelkeenan »

a_bonobo wrote: post #10
brd wrote: post #9

The biggest problem I have with Zuk is that the entire premise of this book is based on a straw man argument. The "Paleo" in paleo diet comes from the fact that there was a clear dip in human health once we entered the neolithic era (i.e. started farming). We are not emulating a caveman's diet per se, we are simply trying to find and remove what caused that original dip in health. To anyone uninformed about the paleo…

That sounds interesting! Do you have any proof for this statement: >there was a clear dip in human health once we entered the neolithic era This statement seems hard to prove seeing as we didn't keep any health-records between 10,000 BC and 2,000 BC (I can see, however, that we currently live quite unhealthy).

The Wikipedia article on the Neolithic Revolution[1] says:

"nutritional standards of Neolithic populations were generally inferior to that of hunter-gatherers, and life expectancy may in fact have been shorter, in part due to diseases. Average height, for example, went down from 5' 10" (178 cm) for men and 5' 6" (168 cm) for women to 5' 3" (165 cm) and 5' 1" (155 cm), respectively, and it took until the twentieth century for average human height to come back to the pre-Neolithic Revolution levels."

The citation is to a Michael Shermer book.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution#Consequenc...

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#27

Post by sid6376 »

graeme wrote: post #16
a_bonobo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds interesting! Do you have any proof for this statement: >there was a clear dip in human health once we entered the neolithic era This statement seems hard to prove seeing as we didn't keep any health-records between 10,000 BC and 2,000 BC (I can see, however, that we currently live quite unhealthy).

I do not know the literature well enough to cite anthropological studies. But as far as I understand it, this is a relatively uncontroversial claim within the field. Jared Diamond's article is a good introduction: http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html Edit: As others have mentioned below, the main evidence is a decline in the height, bone density and tooth health of skeletons of pre and post neolitic humans. Ave…

Previous discussion on hn regarding the link in the post.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2446752

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#28

Post by svedlin »

A few background links on the global decline in human health following the transition to agriculture around 10 kya:

Post-pleistocene human evolution: bioarchaeology of the agricultural transition http://www.cast.uark.edu/local/icaes/conferences/wburg/poste...

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

Health versus fitness: competing themes in the origins and spread of agriculture? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20642145

On the Early Holocene: Foraging to Early Agriculture https://depot.erudit.org/bitstream/002029dd/1/CIRPEE05-02.pd...

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#29

Post by jacalata »

awolf wrote: post #22

Zuk is attacking a straw man here. Thinking about our diets from an evolutionary perspective gives us a framework in which to form educated hypotheses. The way an intelligent person applies paleo-based thinking is by forming theories, not by creating an absolutist belief system. Zuk does nothing to invalidate the application data we have about the past in a logical fashion. If Zuk's point is that some people are appl…

To repeat myself from earlier: If you object to people rebutting this 'straw man', then perhaps you should try and stop people from proposing it. You can't call something a straw man simply because it's not what you personally mean by the word.

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#30

Post by wiredfool »

stcredzero wrote: post #14

> Cordain, who has a Ph.D in exercise physiology, assured Zuk that human beings had not had time to adapt to foods that only became staples with the advent of agriculture. “It’s only been ten thousand years,” he explained. Zuk’s response: “Plenty of time.” We have documented measurable evolution in large mammals in timespans of only several hundred years.

What's more, we have evidence that the lactose processing gene has become widespread in humans in the last 7000 years.

Not to mention the genetic changes that have occurred in the foods over those times.

Post reply on HN