Wally Day wrote:
>> However, all of this shows a remarkable difference between the genuine
>> paleo people of the (g)olden days and us: we live rather much predicted
>>
> or
>
>> predictable lives, at least in terms of food. We can plan our meals
>>
> weeks,
>
>> even months ahead. A paleo would in most cases eat from hand to mouth, if
>>
>
>
>> it makes any sense to say it this way.
>>
>
> Hello Jose Carlos. Been awhile since I chatted with you.
>
> I have been reading quite a bit of research by John K. Williams, an
> Archeologist who is a field researcher (he actually participates in digs).
> Although he agrees - for the most part - with general paleo dietary advice;
> he does take issue with some of the concepts associated with that dietary
> advice. For instance (a post by him from another list):
>
> " The whole concept of hunter-gatherers being "intermittent and
> unpatterned" is certainly not substantiated in the archaeological record.
> Our success as a species (H. sapiens) was due partly because we developed
> logistical subsistence strategies, not opportunistic. In other words, we
> obsessively planned everything, from the movement of the band to coincide
> with migrational animals, to the time of day that was allocated to hunting
> and/or gathering. "
>
> " It wasn't as if people just shambled around until they tripped over an
> antelope. The Paleolithic folks who lived an unpatterned life were
> Darwinian zeros. "
>
> John suggests that unless an individual lived in a climate where he/she
> could literally wake up in the morning and start eating food that was
> simply "lying around", there most certainly would have been a considerable
> amount of predictability in life. It would have been a survival tool. He
> likes to say that it's not just our big brains, but our *obsessiveness*
> that secures our survival.
>
> Food for thought.
>
It is not practical, desirable, nor even possible for modern people to
reproduce the way paleolithic people lived. Even modern hunter gatherers
can't do it. As I have said many times on this list, the goal of a Paleo
diet should be to learn from our origins not to try to reproduce them.
While the above quote represents one man's educated opinion, I've no
doubt that there is a lot of truth to it. However, there would still
have been a lot of variety in a paleo hunter-gatherer's diet, because:
First, there is a limit to how much of any given resource an environment
can provide. This would tend to limit the population that a
hunter-gatherer group could support, but it would also mean that the
most successful groups would have to utilize all of the variety
available to them.
Second, foods, both plant and animal, are seasonal, but it's not as
simple as "fruit in the summer, meat in the winter." The Japanese
describe the flowering of plants as "fronts" using the same word that
they use for weather events. A given flower blooms first in one part of
the country and then spreads across it like a front. By the time the
first front is almost past another has begun. In a similar way, a given
plant food in a given place is available for a very short time, but,
over the course of a year, in many areas (Such as sub-Saharan Africa)
some form of plant food is always available. In more temperate areas
there may be a time when plant food is not available. Humans have been
successful in these environments, yet they are not where we first evolved.
Early humans were nomadic. This is not controversial. It is essentially
impossible that we spread across the entire globe and yet remained a
single species were this not the case. The primary force that would have
caused us to move about so much was the search for food. I've no doubt
that the humans who survived were very good at finding the food they
needed. At the same time, in order to be successful they would have had
to adapt to the variety that different environments provided.
For all of these reasons I believe that any strategy which introduces
increased variety into the diet is consistent with Paleo diet principles.
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