I subscribe to the Scientific American and the July 2018 issue has an article that is very timely and has strong implications based on scientific evidence about our evolution. The article is called “The Real Paleo Diet” by a paleontologist and author of “Evolution’s Bite”, by Peter S. Ungar. What he discovered was that teeth played a major role in what food choices our ancestors made. Ungar spent decades studying wear patterns on fossil teeth and he refers to the clues as “foodprints”. The term Ungar refers to in this article for examining fossilized teeth is “microwear”. By carefully looking at our ancestors teeth and the micro marks on them, it reveals the food choices that that particular species made. Different climate events caused different eating habits in our ancestors.
It is important to understand early ancestral species findings from their microwear or foodprint on the fossilized teeth. The Homo habilis had the smaller brain and lived life more in the trees and the Homo erectus had the bigger brain and lived life more on the ground. Intense environmental changes pushed evolution forward whereby the larger brain species with the better command of stone tools was more flexible in their eating habits. The part of the species branch of our ancestors that did not adapt to the changes in the environment and did not eat a more mixed diet of grasses, plants and animals died out. The Paleolithic anthropological data is complex and the debate continues as to what happened and the reasons why in human evolution.
The point is to acknowledge the impact on human evolution from cyclical intense changes in our environment past, present and future. Climate changes affected our ancestors for instance during a long drought which caused them to choose other foods outside of their ‘normal’ diet by eating what was available - perhaps even in another location - in order to survive. The lesson here is that “no single ancestral human diet” exists for us as a model for what we should be eating at present. What seems to be the key to our evolutionary success is the realization that our ancestors that were the most flexible in their eating habits and adaptability were the ones that survived.
