Hominins selected “healthy” places to live 500,000 to 100,000 years ago

Paleolithic handaxe. Image: José-Manuel Benito

There was plenty of real estate available in the Paleolithic. Hominins and early Homo sapiens probably choose sites according to many factors. Those choosing sites providing better nutritional opportunities were more likely to survive and create new generations.

The handaxe was an advanced Paleolithic tool used in procuring meat and tubers. By analyzing archeological sites on the British and French sides of the English Channel with a high number of handaxes (500 or more), researchers from the University of Southampton identified the types of sites preferred by hominins. Peter Franklin of University of Southampton writes:

“The high concentration of these artefacts suggests significant activity at the sites and that they were regularly used by early hominins.”

Lead author Professor Tony Brown, a physical geographer at the University of Southampton, commented on the study:

"Our research suggests that floodplain zones closer to the mouth of a river provided the ideal place for hominin activity, rather than forested slopes, plateaus or estuaries.

The floodplains provided "seasonal macronutrient advantages" and "could have provided foods rich in key micronutrients, which are linked to better health, the maintenance of fertility and minimization of infant mortality."

Professor Brown on the healthy nature of these sites:

"We can speculate that these types of locations were seen as 'healthy' or 'good' places to live which hominins revisited on a regular basis. If this is the case, the sites may have provided 'nodal points' or base camps along nutrient-rich route-ways through the Palaeolithic landscape, allowing early humans to explore northwards to more challenging environments."

Sources:

• Nutrients in food vital to location of early human settlements
• Site Distribution at the Edge of the Palaeolithic World: A Nutritional Niche Approach

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Mainstream online media advocating the Paleo diet for oral health!?

Speaking with sharecare, Dr. Robin Miller remarked that processed sugars and flour have reduced the diversity of the bacteria in our mouths thus leading to cavity formation. When asked what she recommends, she answered:

“I think we need to go back to eating like our little cave men and women use to, and eat fruits and vegetables and seeds and nuts and berries and organic meats.”

Well said except for the “little” part. Our ancestors from the late Paleolithic were taller & stronger than us:

"... a Spanish Explorer named Álver Núñez Cabeza de Vaca spent nine years (1528-1537) living with Native American tribes in the moderday southern United Sates and northerm Mexico. He described the indigenous people as tall and healthy: "[F]rom a distance they look like giants. They are quite handsome, very lean, very strong and light-footed."

via The Paleo Manifesto

“I saw one!” Welker gasped, still struggling to recover his breath. “He was naked, with long hair. Broad shoulders. Strong. He ran across the bridge. Disappeared into the woods.”

The Arrow People: Catching a glimpse of Paleolithic man

SUNDAY PALEO / January 15, 2012

Adding color to our walls has not changed much in 25,000 years.By Dr. John

Scicurious, at Scientific American Blogs, notes that the Paleolithic diet is “pretty popular among Americans right now.” However, he questions how well we know the details of our ancestors' diet, especially when it comes to fish. Did our ancestors deep sea fish 40,000 years ago? In Does your Paleolithic diet allow tuna?, Scicurious reviews new evidence from Papua New Guinea and nearby islands, such as a cave in the island of East Timor:

The cave holds evidence of a VERY long period of human habitation, with carbon dating showing artifacts as old as 42,000 years before present all the way to the modern period (or at least around 5,000 years ago). Among the shells, beads, stone artifacts, and bone points, are fish bones. LOADS of fish bones. The authors recovered over 38,000 fish bones, representing almost 800 species of fish. And not all of these fish were shallow water specimens. In fact, there were a lot of Scombridae specimens, the tuna group, and these specimens reached back almost to the base of the bone pile, estimated to be, at the bottom, around 42,000 years old.

Is it dinnertime? Although not fish recipes, here are some great Paleo/Primal meals to consider:

Fajita Frittata with Avocado Salsa

Oven Roast Chicken with Truffle Salt and Thyme

Slow Cooked Lamb Roast

You're eating well and starting to see some results from your Primal or Paleo diet. What about exercise? Is it time to start lifting weights? Maybe do some cardio? These should be easy decisions, but when you consider our Paleolithic ancestors, things get tricky. Josh Noel wonders, if our “modern notion of exercise has gone astray?” Learn more on this brewing controversy at Train like a caveman. 

Erwan Le Corre, founder of MovNat, suggests the way to determine how to exercise is to ask: What is the best fitness regimen for a tiger (or a tigress)?

So isn’t it high time for a healthy and meaningful paradigm shift in the way society and the fitness industry approaches fitness?  In the way you are personally approaching exercising?  Aren’t you thirsty for authentic human movement?

Here’s the right answer: in order to become and stay optimally fit, a tiger needs to move the way tigers move in their natural biome.  It is that simple.  Tigers will move naturally when they’re free to live the natural life every tiger should live; as will all other wild animals.

Read the post and let me know what do you think. Does it take more for us to regain or maintain fitness than "authentic human movement"? 

Finally, take a look at the recent post by John Michael and contribute your thoughts to Notes on a Manifesto.

John Michael: Notes on a Manifesto

View from Paleolithic rock shelter, Patagonia, Chile

Paleo is unique in that it's an overarching life plan and has actually influenced my perception of eating, exercise, and my body. It's no longer a struggle to lose fat or gain muscle. After almost 3 decades of fighting my body, the Paleo approach has taught me how best to respect and maintain it.

In the blogosphere and on Reddit people are talking about the added awareness Paleo-dieting has brought them. Some came to this diet in their fight against obesity, others to increase athletic performance, but for all going Paleo has created such a level of improvement that they’ve begun to wonder, “Can I apply this logic to the non-dietary aspects of my life?” 

They start by altering their sleeping habits and sun-exposure times. Then they begin to change their shoes, slipping on Vibram Five Fingers. They even modify their exercise routines to mimic the daily exertions of Paleolithic humans. Every change springs from the question, “What is best for my body according to its evolutionary history?”

My own observations of this trend have been informed by the questions, “Can what you eat change how you live?” and, “Can a diet change a culture? 

First, I looked at the Standard American Diet and considered how it came about.

We don’t have time to wait for a meal, much less prepare one. Fast food is born. It’s been a long day, and we’d rather not get out of the car. The drive-thru is engendered. Our high-stress jobs require little physical exertion, and great mental effort, while our grain-based, sugar-laden, processed foods, assisted by television and the computer, and for some alcohol and cigarettes, provide us a temporary relief, alongside long-term damage.

Ignored, the body slowly takes its revenge, as waistlines expand, preventable diseases thrive, and a general malaise settles upon the land. To compound the problem, we treat our ailments with drugs that make our symptoms bearable without curing us. 

Observing the growth of Paleo, I’ve come to speculate on its underlying principles. I took these notes months ago, in the hopes of creating a manifesto, which I intended to call “The Paleo Cosmovision.” Now, curious to know what others might have to add, I’ve decided to crowd-source my ideas.

I use "cosmovision" and not its synonym "world view" because the Paleo Cosmovision is not a perspective on the world, but a vision of the cosmos, of life in its entirety.

There is a simple principle underlying the Paleo lifestyle, and that is that we, as human beings, were designed to eat certain foods, and that we were designed to do certain things and to live in certain environments. Which is to say, then, that our lives have a design.

Extending this principle to its logical conclusion, the goal of the Paleo life is to live in line with the patterns that formed us.

Attention then must be paid to the components of our environments: have we introduced harmful elements into our living spaces? Does the routine in which we live respect the needs of our bodies and minds?

Obviously there are parts of the past that we would rather leave behind us, like constant warfare and other forms of brutality. But we cannot forget that the best parts of us also came from these original human environments; if we shun them for their ability to stimulate our brutality, then we may also perhaps starve those elements of our nature that comprise the best of us.

We are not the products of a pristine hunter-gatherer environment living within a modern world; evolution did not stop at the agricultural revolution. So it is perhaps unwise to think that a truly Paleo lifestyle would entail a complete return to nature; but perhaps the rate of change in our culture has outstripped us - perhaps progress has carried us further away from ourselves than we were ready to go. In which case the work of progress then becomes adjusting itself to the realities of our human condition.

We are modern human beings. We have built the modern world as a way to empower us, to reduce our victimization by the forces of nature and our own brutality. The modern world is no more than a realized dream of empowerment. But the dream becomes a nightmare when it victimizes those who built it.

Feel free to add any thoughts, additions, edits, or corrections in the comments section below!

Lecture: “Diet & Human Population Density in Paleolithic Mediterranean”

Anthropologist Mary Stiner lectures at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas on Mar. 7, 2011:

What is the legacy of the human ecological footprint in deep time? Our speaker explores the question by sorting out some features of Paleolithic meat diets in Mediterranean Eurasia. These involve predator-prey dynamics, transitions in energy acquisition, and the allocation of labor. By the Late Pleistocene, foragers were restructuring the living communities around them, with consequences for both diet and demographic robustness. These changes in turn altered social relations within early forager societies and also affected the development of cooperative networks across human society.

Learn more here.

Rare look at Paleoindian burial, housing, and nutrition

White-tailed Ptarmigan. Image: Footwarrior11,500 years ago in the Tanana lowlands of central Alaska, a three-year-old child died. The cause of death is not known. According to Natasha Pinol, writing for EurekaAlert, “the remains showed no signs of injury or illness, though that isn't surprising, since most health problems don't leave traces in bones.” The child, a member of a Paleoindian family or clan that was “among the first to colonize the Americas”, lived in a house.

Colored stains in the sediment suggest that poles may have been used to support the walls or roof, though it's not clear what the latter would have been made of. The entire house has not yet been fully excavated, so its total size is still unknown. (Pinol) 

After cremation, the child was buried “in a large pit in the center of the home.” Archeologist Ben Potter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, one of the discoverers, notes:

All the evidence indicates that they went through some effort. The burial was within the house. If you think of the house as the center of many residential activities: cooking, eating, sleeping, and the fact that they abandoned the house soon afterward the cremation, this is pretty compelling evidence of the careful treatment of the child.

Pinol writes:

In contrast to the temporary hunting camps and other specialized work sites that have produced much of the evidence of North America's early habitation, the newly discovered house appears to have been a seasonal home, used during the summer. Its inhabitants, who included women and children, foraged for fish, birds and small mammals nearby, according to Potter's team.

Evidence of a Paleolithic diet was discovered in sediment at the bottom of the 18-inch deep pit, specifically bone of “salmon, ground squirrels, ptarmigan and other small animals.”

The discovery provides a rare look at domestic life of the Paleoindians that crossed, or, more likely, descended from those that crossed the Beringian Land Bridge to Alaska. The report of the find will be published 25 February issue of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 

Source: Child's cremation site reveals domestic life in Paleoindian Alaska at EurekaAlert

Are mainstream nutritionists beginning to recognize the value of Paleolithic nutrition?

Steer clear. Image: KobakoYesterday the Los Angeles Times published an article by Marni Jameson that may nudge the mainstream a tiny step forward to primal nutrition. The article - A reversal on carbs: Fat was once the devil. Now more nutritionists are pointing accusingly at sugar and refined grains - begins thus:

Most people can count calories. Many have a clue about where fat lurks in their diets. However, fewer give carbohydrates much thought, or know why they should.

But a growing number of top nutritional scientists blame excessive carbohydrates — not fat — for America's ills. They say cutting carbohydrates is the key to reversing obesity, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and hypertension.

Click to read more ...

Paleolithic & hunter-gatherer sleep

Poor sleep is a major barrier to good health. Before we consider ways to improve our sleep, we need to look back to the Paleolithic and to hunter-gatherer societies. Paleo-anatomists studying fossilized skeletons of Australopithecus and Homo habilis note they were well adapted to climbing. Although they probably spent much of daytime on the ground, they likely slept in trees. Sleeping on the ground probably began with the control of fire, which, in addition to improving nutrition, provided safety.

The first hominid to control fire may have been late Homo habilis, or Homo ergaster. Cooking provided a higher quality and more digestible diet, which led to a smaller gut and a larger brain (the expensive tissue hypothesis). Both day and night could be spent on the ground and hominid anatomy slowly became more human-like. The resulting hominid, Homo erectus, was tall and well adapted for migration over land. Their vestibular anatomy also indicates a primarily ground-based existence.

Richard Wrangham, Professor of Anthropology at Harvard, in his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, writes:

Click to read more ...