EAT LIKE A CAVE MAN

This article first appeared in PORK #3. PORK #4 is out now, get it here!

The Palaeo Diet is an archaeology role-playing game cleverly disguised as a health food fad. The idea is to eat only what was available to our Palaeolithic ancestors, before the invention of agriculture. That includes lots of meat, fish, fruit and vegetables, but no cheese, milk, bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, beer, wine, or whiskey. It’s the Atkins diet (remember that from the ‘90s? all meat, no carbs) with an archaeopop veneer, as interpreted by bearded tech workers in Brooklyn. 

There’s some truth to it: until 10,000 years ago, people ate very little sugar and no refined carbohydrates. Palaeo fans argue that the real causes of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and other ‘diseases of civilization’ are the foods that were introduced in the Neolithic Revolution: processed grains, dairy products, and alcohol. The Palaeo diet means radically rethinking healthy eating: carbohydrates and sugar, not fat, is the enemy.

The diet, which has been featured in the New York Times (in the fashion section, naturally), Time Magazine, and even the Colbert Report, has spawned a tribe of entrepreneurs whose business is getting you in touch with your inner Neanderthal. The ‘Caveman Power Diet’ promises that by cutting out bread, fries, and beer, you will lose weight, increase your energy, detox your system, sharpen your mind, and get in touch with your inner self:

The Caveman Power Diet gets you tuned into your animal instincts, and as a result your senses will become sharper; like an animal in the wild who needs all his senses to survive.
When you are in tune with your animal instincts, you are in tune with your body's wants and needs. Throughout this diet you will notice yourself having more clarity of mind, and a deeper sense of knowing thyself.

The idea of recreating a pure ancient lifestyle is key to the appeal. Last year the NY Times profiled the trend, including French Palaeo guru Erwan Le Corre:

Mr. Le Corre, 38, who once made soap for a living, promotes what he calls “mouvement naturel” at exercise retreats in West Virginia and elsewhere. His workouts include scooting around the underbrush on all fours, leaping between boulders, playing catch with stones, and other activities at which he believes early man excelled. These are the “primal, essential skills that I believe everyone should have,” he said in an interview.

Another caveman trick involves donating blood frequently. The idea is that various hardships might have occasionally left ancient humans a pint short. Asked when he last gave blood, Andrew Sanocki said it had been three months. He and his brother looked at each other. “We’re due,” Andrew said.

Here's Le Corre in action. It's basically parkour in the jungle!


This is definitely a nice change from the office job and the McDonald's drive-through, but the archaeological theories behind the Palaeo diet are about a 50 years out of date. The Palaeolithic used to be taught as the age of ‘MAN THE HUNTER’: endless buffets of wooly mammoth steaks washed down with some wild berries and seeds, while you sit on bearskin rugs around the fire in your cave dwelling. As it turns out, archaeology suggests that animal meat was not a majority in most ancient diets. Men brag about hunting like they brag about anything, but in most cultures women made a greater nutritional contribution with their gathered nuts, grains, vegetables, fruits, and seeds. But the Palaeo diet comes out of folk archaeology, not real archaeology. “Caveman” and “Neanderthal” evoke raw, authentic manliness for a generation of overeducated cubicle serfs with neglected bodies.

But what about the idea that we ‘evolved’ for a Palaeo diet? I'm not so sure. Genes evolve quickly: most sedentary human populations (Europeans, Africans, and most Asians) gained genetic tolerance for lactose and alcohol within a few hundred generations, an eye-blink in evolutionary time. As desperate as we are for absolute truth since we kicked God to the curb, you won’t find it in our genes. They change quickly when they need to. If humans are ‘naturally designed’ to do anything, it’s to adapt to new environments. (This is why the current geological age – the Anthropocene – is named after us).

Which brings me to the next point: which palaeolithic diet are we talking about? Even today, there’s an incredible diversity of hunter-gatherer lifestyles around the world. Native people in the Arctic get 75% of their food from animal fat, but that’s a recent innovation too (the high arctic was only settled around 15,000 years ago). African hunter-gatherers get about 25% of their calories from animal products. And it’s simply not true that grains and starches played no role in Palaeolithic cultures. Aboriginal Australians made (and make) a carb-rich “bush bread”, and in my home state of California, acorns were a staple food in the period before contact. There is no singular ‘Palaeo diet’. The only rule is diversity, adaptation, and change.

As a role-playing game, the Palaeo diet seems like fun – you get to try new eating patterns (including lots of expensive, high quality meat and fish) while feeling superior to everyone down at the pub grubbing on fries. And running around on all fours grunting in the underbrush sounds pretty awesome too. But let’s keep it in perspective! The Palaeo diet is playtime for rich people in the global north. Feeding the world on mostly meat products is ecologically impossible.

Of course, if you're serious about the lifestyle, you gotta catch that fish like this (via Discovery):

There’s also a misanthropic primitivist agenda lurking in the corner. As Ray Audette (of NeanderThin.com) writes:

my definition of nature is the absence of technology. Technology-dependent foods would never be ingested by a human being in Nature. I determined, therefore, to eat only those foods that would be available to me if I were naked of all technology…

What a moron. Humans have always used technology – what else is a stone tool? – and our chimpanzee cousins do too. A human being without technology… is not a human being. It’s a meaningless concept, unless you read it as a theological statement: humans have fallen from the grace of our ancestors and been punished with obesity and disease. If we return to an upright lifestyle, we’ll be rewarded with health, happiness, and long life. It’s a pastiche of Original Sin, with pizza and beer in the place of the apple.

That said, I still find the Palaeo diet appealing. Underneath the bullshit there’s some real sense to it – eating nutrient- and protein-rich foods is good for your body, while sugar and white bread are not. A bit of perspective is in order, which is why I love Kurt Harris’s blog Archevore, which is full of interesting discussion of the Palaeo diet from a scientific perspective. Harris strikes a middle ground: 

That we are eating some things we are clearly inadequately adapted to seems certain, but the idea that the dietary bright line is narrow and exists at the 10,000 year mark is a cartoon view not supported by the science. I believe most of the dietary damage is due to industrial processing amplifying the effect of things that have always been around and were never good for us in the first place, even as I do believe wheat and other grains to the exclusion of animal products has been an issue for 10,000 years.

Want more? There's lots of trainers and lifestyle gurus that will help you get in touch with your inner caveman for a modest fee:

Hunter-gatherer.com

Cavemanpower.com

Palaeodiet.com

Cavemanhomecompanion.com

Playing fetch in the Palaeolithic

 

Today's mammoth NOMs brought to you by Discovery News:

The remains of three Paleolithic dogs, including one with a mammoth bone in its mouth, have been unearthed at Předmostí in the Czech Republic, according to a new Journal of Archaeological Science paper.
The remains indicate what life was like for these prehistoric dogs in this region, and how humans viewed canines. The dogs appear to have often sunk their teeth into meaty mammoth bones. These weren’t just mammoth in terms of size, but came from actual mammoths.
In the case of the dog found with the bone in its mouth, the researchers believe a human inserted it there after death.
"The thickness of the cortical bone shows that it is from a large mammal, like a rhinoceros, steppe bison or mammoth," lead author Mietje Germonpré told Discovery News. "At Předmostí, mammoth is the best represented animal, with remains from more than 1,000 individuals, so it is probable that the bone fragment is from a mammoth."

I call that burying Fido properly. These dogs had heads with a similar shape to the Siberian husky, but were larger and more muscular. That's a big dog! It's unusual to find such strong evidence of domestication at such an early date, but being an archaeological optimist, I'm more pleased than surprised. So many of the things that surround us have very deep roots, including throwing bones for your favorite furry critter.

Glass Dildos and Palaeolithic Bronzes: Why Private Collections Are Not Always a Good Idea

Here's my first dispatch from Gaziantep, which I visited for 10 days this month. Gaziantep is an up-and-coming metropolis in southeast Turkey that's been making a lot of money off of industry (a lot of European firms make products for the Middle Eastern market in factories there), and also investing a lot of money in parks, museums, and restoration of historic buildings. Since our research was on exactly that, we stopped by some neat places like the new city museum, the Emine Gögüs Kitchen Museum, and the new Zeugma Mosaic Museum (all very cool).

We also stopped by the Medusa Glass Museum, which is a stunning private collection of ancient glass hosted in a charmingly restored Antep house.

It's hard to overstate the quality of the materials - the place is packed with Roman glass and jewelry. It's all completely unprovenienced, of course, and no doubt was all pulled from tombs by looters not too long ago. Not sure how they got the collection legalized.

Seriously, check it out. There's three floors of it: perfume bottles, wine jars, oil bottles, and water jars, all in ancient glass. The quantity and quality is stunning.

Despite the quality of the stuff on display, but there's a total lack of quality control on the labels, with hilarious results. This one is labeled  'ROMAN TIME SEXUAL OBJECT'.

Here's a close up, cause I know you want one.

Now look, I'm willing to call a dong a dong, as in the Swedish archaeo-dildo controversy last year. But these aren't phallus-shaped at all, and believe me, the Romans were not shy about realistic depictions of the phallus. (And, I gotta point out that this looks like a real uncomfortable dildo.) In fact, these look to me like the glass rods used as raw material in glassblowing, given a little 'extra imagination'.

Then we have this thing here, which is labeled 'BREAST PUMP, 2nd Century AD'. I have no idea what this particular vessel is for, but I'm pretty sure it's not a breast pump.

Here's another howler, though you have to be a nerd to laugh really hard: 'PALAEOLITHIC TIME AXE, 3500 BC'. It's made of METAL, dumbass! The Palaeolithic is the 'old stone age'! There was no metal stuff! Plus, it ended about 20,000 years ago in this area. Obviously whoever wrote this got confused with the  Bronze Age, but even then 3500 BC is still way too early.

 
And that axe head doesn't even fit the mold! Who knows, it could be modern, or a fake. There's no way to know.

Though I commend the creators of this museum for having information panels, they apparently used Google translate or something for the English, because it's hilariously incomprehensible. In all, I was left both thrilled by the stuff on the shelf and horrified by the inanity of the people who own it.

Now, I'm not saying this to rag on Gaziantep or Turkey, but rather to point out that private collections are prone to this kind of thing. When I was a kid I remember going with my grandfather to a lot of private galleries and homes with large collections of cool, weird, sometimes ancient artifacts. Inevitably these things were put together by super-enthusiastic collectors who loved the objects but had no idea about their history, and so just made up their own interpretations.

Now there's lots of art market types out there, like say the Getty Foundation's new director, who would like to make it easier to buy and sell antiquities. They run under the assumption that private collectors are all smart, sophisticated, fancy people who are just as good stewards of the past as a public institution or nation-state - therefore we should jettisoning protections against looting and loosening the scrutiny of stolen antiquities. Now, I'm a critic of the mania for state ownership of cultural property too, but let's be real. For every collector who is a highly educated aesthete with impeccable knowledge of ancient history, there's an uninformed dumbasses who can't tell a dildo from a doorknob. With these people you get bad conservation conditions, poor information for visitors (if visitors are even allowed to see the stuff), and ample room for the kind of hilariously ignorant fantasy we see here.

As I've said before, it's not just a question of being pedantic about ancient history. The truth about the past is COOLER than bullshit, and it can mean something to people. Letting random people make up whatever they want about history might be a good business model (see the 'History' channel), but it's a disservice to the future.