The paleo diet never existed.Scientists have discovered what early humans actually ate.

Humans are really limited in how much protein they can metabolize for energy, which means early humans really needed a balanced diet to survive.

The Paleo diet never existed.Scientists have discovered what the first humans actually ate.

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The Paleo diet has popularized the meat-based image of a caveman-style diet, but this image is far from the archaeological truth.

According to scientific studies of what hominins and early humans ate, fossil and genetic evidence shows that they were not extreme carnivores.

The idea was a plant-based diet during the transition to agriculture, but our ancestors relied on plants for hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture existed.

Paleo.Carnivore.Caveman.Whatever term you prefer to call it, some of the most popular diets of recent years go back hundreds of thousands of years, when early humans lived in caves and ate mostly the meat of megafauna that they speared - right?

Wrong. The assumption that our Paleolithic ancestors ate nothing but animal protein and fat may be familiar from scenes of Fred Flintstone hoisting a monstrous dino drumstick or carting home a huge rack of brontosaurus ribs (never mind that dinosaurs and humans never actually coexisted). But that stereotype probably came from the plethora of fossilized bones we had to study versus the lack of plant materials, which never made it into the archaeological record because they decomposed too quickly.

Determined to find out whether meat was the only food on the typical paleolithic menu, researchers from the Australian National University and the University of Toronto Mississauga looked back at past scientific research to examine whether the people we call cavemen were mostly carnivores.The image of a hairy hunter preparing to bite off a bloody mammoth leg proved difficult.In fact, early Homo sapiens, and even their ancestors, looked to Neanderthals and Denisovans primarily as a source of protein.Of course, this means meat to some extent.But it also means plant material such as seeds and nuts.

"This focus on animals and hunting in the Paleolithic is obviously partly due to biases in the archaeological record," said researchers in a study recently published in the Journal of A Archaeological Research, "including the high archaeological visibility of animals compared to plant remains, especially in the more distant past, and the challenges of assessing boneotopic proteins, which are only representative of plant calories. and therefore underrepresent foods rich in starch and fat."

After much research, scientists have discovered that microscopic traces of plant-based products such as nuts, seeds, tubers, grains, fruits and vegetables continue to appear on the surface of archaeological sites, where Paleolithic human remains and evidence of hunting have also been found.There was also evidence of plant tissue processing.Early processing methods, such as grinding and grinding, made tough plants easier to chew and digest, while cooking made them more palatable.and may have poisoned some species.

What many people still find hard to believe is that early humans were always very adaptable.Archaeologist Kenneth Flannery was the first to publish an explanation of this adaptive concept with a theory called the Broad Spectrum Revolution in 1969, which suggested that hunters began to look beyond the megaphone in the Epipaleolithic, a period of the Stone Age between the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic.Flannery thought, A wide variety of foods, including wild grasses and other plant foods, was the beginning of what he called the Agricultural Revolution.This belief was accepted for many years.

The stereotypical preference of cavemen for mammoth meat aside, there is a physiological reason that even humans and early Homo sapiens who hunted for survival could not subsist on meat alone.Hypercarnivores are designed to produce large amounts of lean protein.On the other hand, humans are limited in the amount of protein that they can metabolize for energy.Because the human liver only has a lot of capacity to Elevate enzymes that break down proteins, excessive consumption can cause protein poisoning caused by excessive ammonia and amino acids in the blood.This means several weeks of lethargy, nausea and diarrhea that can be fatal.

Recent studiesThis study on human and ancient hominin genomes has provided strong evidence that regular plant consumption during the Paleolithic period AMY1, a salivary amylase gene that is important in breaking down carbohydrates.It began replicating before modern humans began to split from Neanderthals and Denisovans 800,000 years ago (of course, agriculture wouldn't appear until 12,000 years ago). This gene is associated with the consumption of high amounts of starch.So the presence of the gene in the genomes of three Neanderthals and one Denisovan suggests that our ancestors ate large amounts of starch before our species even diverged from them. Ancient DNA from plaque on Neanderthal and Homo sapiens teeth also shows adaptations to starch.

Based on these findings, the researchers came up with a new hypothesis, the spectrum spectrum hypothesis, which rewrites the history of what humans and hominins first ate.There are no hypercarnivores in our evolutionary line.We are and have always been omnivores, flexible and adaptable to the availability of food.The genus Homo usually leans towards lipids and carbohydrates rather than lean proteins.Our ability to change plant foods has contributed to the success of our genus and species.While Flannery thought that plants were consumed only by stone age men in the absence of meat, in fact we have eaten them.

So go ahead and enjoy that ridiculously expensive steak, but remember that man does not, cannot live on meat alone.

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