Actually 3 is still true assuming that they don't die from some sort of brute force or starvation. The longest lived peoples on the planet also live the most simplistically. And that tends to be regardless of whether its meat or vegetable. There are many examples of 60/70+ year old individuals from tropical basin hunter gathers.
1. is also true when you limit it to our origins in the tropical basin, people generally didn't survive into the cold blue yonder as hunter gathers.
4. Is almost always true when comparing a traditional diet to a grain based diet. The diet of wheat that has been pushed down our throats was historically proven to be the worst as exemplified by the Egyptian culture.
The low sucess rate now can be attributed to us having a vastly different world than of many years past, with very few people and lots of animals, especially in the the tropical basin, hunting would not be difficult and would not occupy all of your day since a little cooperation can net one larger animal feeding the group. Our ancestors DID NOT start in the cold barren wasteland but in regions where they could live near naked.
The lifespan averages again typically involve a lot of speculation and a lot of deaths due to being killed by something or falling or whatever. Historically men were killed by something other than old age.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chuckm
I seriously question assertions 1 and 3. I don't have any reason to doubt 2. I'd put a huge asterisk on 4.
1) Typically about 80% of the paleolithic diet came from gathering. Gathering sufficient food to provide about 900 digestible calories per day, with enough variation to provide all the required nutrients probably took more than 2 hours, especially during winter. Hunting with primitive weapons is a dubious thing (anybody here ever tried to hunt with a spear? a bow and arrow made from sticks, a stone, and plant-fiber twine?) and probably involved much more than 2 hours a day and had a low success rate.
3) The sources I've found put paleolithic life expectancies between 33 and 54 (if you made it past 15 years old, you had a good chance of making it to 39-54). In the neolithic, life expectancy was about 20. Could you point me to your source?
The problem with that is that paleolithic populations were processing cereal grains for food some 23000 years ago, with evidence suggesting as early as 200,000 years ago ( Piperno, D; Weiss, E., Hols, I., Nadel, D (2004), 200,000 years from People, Plants and Genes: The Story of Crops and Humanity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.). Everybody would be, as you termed it, a hybrid.
FYI, both the American Dietic Association and the National Health Service of England have designated the "Paleolithic diet" (aka caveman diet) as a fad diet. |