Humans have always eaten carbs; it’s the body’s preferred energy source. But human bodies can get energy from three sources, in order of preference—carbs, fat, and muscle (when all else fails).
Our bodies evolved to store fat for this very reason—future energy needs. Ancient humans lived feast or famine, and our biology adapted. We’re built to fast for days, using body fat for energy. When carbs are available, they’re preferred because they are faster and easier to burn.
Sugar is carbs. But ancient fruit in no way resembles today’s cultivated monstrosities, in appearance or sugar content.
Our modern problem is—we gorge on carbs all day long. So our body helpfully stores the excess as body fat for future use—because it expects eventual ‘famine’ where we’ll be fasting and need it. But we never let our body get to burn that fat.
There’s many theories but one that I learned was that women and children provides the bulk of the calories for Early Humans. While the men went out and hunted for meat they also relied on the fruit harvested by the women and children. That would give them the energy necessary for trekking and hunting.
Everyone participated in everything. Getting food was basically 90% of everyone's day. When berries were in season, which might only be a week or two, everyone picked berries. When the salmon migrated, everyone worked the river. And then, when there were no plants in season and the only calories were from hunting, everyone supported the hunt.
The idea of four guys going into the woods and spearing a deer is a myth, a false parallel to modern sport hunting. Beaters pushed the prey towards kill zones. Fires could be set to get game moving. Fences would be biult to funnel game. And everyone was involved in processing the kill. Sure, maybe the big guys threw the spears but that was actually a small part of the process. The safest kill would always have been that where the animal injured itself first, no big guy muscles required. So there were plenty of jobs for all abilities.
But the Inca lived to late for this discussion. They already had advanced agriculture. For evolutionary terms, the time before agriculture and the time of the predecessors of homo sapiens are more relevant, because that time span was larger by orders of magnitude.
If you’re constantly moving sugar is a necessity for maintaining glycogen. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any food type, it’s all about context.
Kind of; humans do adapt remarkably well to low-glucose diets, and we can produce glycogen without sugary inputs via gluconeogenesis. They do make it much easier, though.
I don't think this is new. The idea always was that proto-humans had to live in an environment rich with energy dense food (fruit) prior to growing a brain large enough to figure out how to make barbeque. Otherwise you never get to the barbeque capable brain. The whole point of making fire and therefore consuming cooked meat is that now you can migrate to places that don't have abundant sources of energy dense food.
Interesting, but I've read for a long time, that our humanoid predecessors at some point figured out how to get to bone marrow with tools. That provided the energy dense food as well an evolutionary impetus to develop larger brains to build better tools and handle them better. Fire and the capability to cook were developed much later.
My interpretation was similar. The carb-sugar diet was never a highlight because it was a given. The article talks about primates that have high carb-sugar diets but doesn't explain why their brains remain so small compared to humans. Maybe they will eventually evolve? Maybe cooked meat / dense protein is the X factor? If so, that takes back to the beginning and highlights protein. It seems reasonable the combination of the two would be important. Protein enables muscle development, human evolution made us exceptionally well-suited for long-distance and endurance travel compared to all other living primates. This further improves are ability to forage and is just an evolutionary winning combination.
My curiosity leads me more towards, are their other primates that had similar / convergent evolution that independently discovered dense protein sources? Is homo sapien really just a path of singular linear "march of progress" evolution? Were there other marches of progress from other primates or any other species that we competed against or merged with? Those kind of questions become more interesting once you realize the diet combination that creates big brains
>about primates that have high carb-sugar diets but doesn't explain why their brains remain so small compared to humans. Maybe they will eventually evolve?
if they have abundant sources of carb-sugar, there would be no selection pressure to evolve in a particular direction.
Don't most evolutionary traits/changes come at times of restrictions? I don't think many traits are developed during times of abundance, it's when there is a shortage and they have to seek out something else; like protein. Or, sometimes it's just natural competition for the share of the abundance. If there where a big brain out competing you for your carbs, you might have to reconsider your dietary options and make substitutes/changes that would have evolutionary implications.
Have to consider meat digestion from a net calorie perspective. Eating raw meat is possible sure. But once you get to dense protein meats like a red meat, your body expends a lot of calories in the act of digesting it raw. Cooking it is like a pre-digestion step and allows your body to digest it with less energy expenditure.
It also probably was helpful for other reasons. You could store cooked meat easier/longer without refrigeration or kill off some of the bacteria and such making it healthier.
It’s interesting. Human baby is in ketosis when born, breast feeding maintains it. There is no essential carb.. Switching to ketogenic diet is cure for many health issues.
Then again, I know fruitarian who runs ultramarathons. He eats only sugar, so clearly human body can run on two different fuels very well.
Maybe we shouldn’t mix them but choose just the other? Carbs or fat. It would make sense that if there are two paths to get energy from eating, the system may not run optimally if you keep feeding both at the same time?
Why would that make sense? People are always coming up with diets that look something like “stop eating bananas because they have been secretly making you sick and only eat blueberries which cleanse all your toxins” (and whatever variants thereof). It makes sense in a “doctors hate this one simple trick” sense but not biologically.
Our bodies evolved to store fat for this very reason—future energy needs. Ancient humans lived feast or famine, and our biology adapted. We’re built to fast for days, using body fat for energy. When carbs are available, they’re preferred because they are faster and easier to burn.
Sugar is carbs. But ancient fruit in no way resembles today’s cultivated monstrosities, in appearance or sugar content.
Our modern problem is—we gorge on carbs all day long. So our body helpfully stores the excess as body fat for future use—because it expects eventual ‘famine’ where we’ll be fasting and need it. But we never let our body get to burn that fat.
The idea of four guys going into the woods and spearing a deer is a myth, a false parallel to modern sport hunting. Beaters pushed the prey towards kill zones. Fires could be set to get game moving. Fences would be biult to funnel game. And everyone was involved in processing the kill. Sure, maybe the big guys threw the spears but that was actually a small part of the process. The safest kill would always have been that where the animal injured itself first, no big guy muscles required. So there were plenty of jobs for all abilities.
Also tubers.
Or a knapsack of dried fatty meat with a fairly indefinite shelf life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu%C3%B1o
My curiosity leads me more towards, are their other primates that had similar / convergent evolution that independently discovered dense protein sources? Is homo sapien really just a path of singular linear "march of progress" evolution? Were there other marches of progress from other primates or any other species that we competed against or merged with? Those kind of questions become more interesting once you realize the diet combination that creates big brains
if they have abundant sources of carb-sugar, there would be no selection pressure to evolve in a particular direction.
When we’re capable of eating animals raw. And bugs and worms etc.
Whereas in order to consume a wider variety of plants, cooking and other more complex perpetrations are absolutely necessary.
It also probably was helpful for other reasons. You could store cooked meat easier/longer without refrigeration or kill off some of the bacteria and such making it healthier.
Also much like today, early humans did not do so if there was a way to cook it.
* https://warndu.com/blogs/blog/traditional-aboriginal-food
Then again, I know fruitarian who runs ultramarathons. He eats only sugar, so clearly human body can run on two different fuels very well.
Maybe we shouldn’t mix them but choose just the other? Carbs or fat. It would make sense that if there are two paths to get energy from eating, the system may not run optimally if you keep feeding both at the same time?