What did the ancestors of modern man eat?
Food of ancient people
Anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky – about the nutrition of human ancestors, the evolution of the brain and the diet of modern people.
One of the most burning questions asked by anthropologists is: "What did our ancestors eat?" The answer to it is interesting to many, as people are trying to adjust their own diet, diet, to the paleo diet, which was supposedly the most correct in the past. In principle, the idea is quite correct. Our organism did not arise from scratch, but has gone a long way of evolution, and we are adapted to the specific conditions in which our ancestors lived. If, for example, our ancestors ate turnips all their lives, then our digestive tract, teeth and other digestive organs should be adapted to eating turnips, so eating turnips properly, then we can live longer.
But here the question arises: what did the ancient people actually eat and is this approach correct at all? At first glance, it is correct, but in fact we cannot know for sure. It is always worth remembering that our ancestors lived on average for about thirty years, so if we eat the same way and live in the same conditions as our ancestors, we will die at thirty. What we eat now is not quite right, from the point of view of our ancestors. This leads, for example, to the fact that we have a lot of caries, periodontal disease and other dental diseases. On the other hand, a modern person usually lives up to sixty years. And if he lives well, then he can quite reach a hundred and twenty.
So what did our ancestors eat? The general idea is extremely simple: they ate whatever was at hand. Man as a species, as a genus, and even as a family, strictly speaking, arose as an omnivore. Our ancestors, starting with the proconsuls, ate everything. Another thing is that at different times there was not the same food nearby. While they were proconsul-type monkeys living in trees in a tropical forest in Africa, they ate mostly fruits and leaves. And the diet was, judging by the teeth (teeth are perfectly preserved) and by the wear of these teeth, about the same as that of a chimpanzee. This idea formed the basis of fruit-eating, the current fruit-eating, although at least 15 million years have passed since the existence of proconsuls. Therefore, fruit–eating is, of course, good, but no one has canceled 15 million years either.
In the subsequent time, when the ancestors of humans began to move out of the rainforests into the savannah, for a long time, characteristically, they still fed on forest vegetation. There are many ways to find out: by the wear of teeth, by the microstructure of enamel, by the trace element composition of bones, because depending on what we eat, different amounts of micro- and macroelements accumulate in bones. And isotope analysis, that is, different parts of plants and animals contain different isotopes for different reasons, and so in the first approximation it is possible to understand what an individual ate during his life or at least the last few years before his death: underground parts of plants, aboveground parts of plants, woody plants, steppe plants, invertebrates of some kind, nuts or tree bark. Finally, from the moment when people began to use the tool and eat a lot of meat, we find bones with incisions and other devices.
When ancient people began to live in the savanna, they continued to eat forest food for a long time. For example, ardipithecus, who lived 4.5 million years ago, was in a transitional environment, where half a forest and half something like a park, and ate plant food, wood. But the climate worsened, the spaces opened up, and already by about 3 million years ago (even more, about 3.5 million years ago) ardipithecus came out into the open savannas and ate almost only savannah plants: grain, rhizomes.
Different species of Australopithecus ate differently. Afar Australopithecus, Gary Australopithecus, paranthropus are slightly different. For example, South African paranthropus ate rhizomes, and Boyce in East Africa ate grass sedge. But this plant phase lasted for about a million years, and by the time of 3 to 2.5 million years, there was a transition to a new level. This coincides with the emergence of the genus Homo. To a large extent, the change of diet played a huge role, because at that time the climate became much colder and drier, there was less food in the savannah, a large number of different animals died out, including ungulates, a bunch of predators died out, and our ancestors occupy a niche of these same predators, begin to eat a lot of meat. We know this from their bones again and from what we find from about 2.5 million years ago and beyond, bones with incisions. The use of the tool begins.
So, the emergence of the genus Homo is a transition to omnivore in a broad sense. Of course, our ancestors, thank God, did not become predators in the narrow sense, they ate not only meat, but began to eat a lot of meat. When our ancestors of the genus Homo began to switch to meat food in greater numbers, this allowed them to grow brains. Because in order to chew meat, you need to make less effort, because animal cells do not have cellulose cell walls, but plant cells do. Those individuals whose jaws are slightly smaller than those of their ancestors began to survive. Small jaws have become less harmful. Therefore, people with smaller chewing apparatus, with smaller jaws and teeth, with smaller ridges for attaching chewing muscles, with smaller muscles began to survive. And there is such a wonderful math that the density of bones and muscles is twice as high as the density of the brain. The brain has it almost like water, and the bones have two units. Accordingly, when our jaws and teeth decrease by a cubic centimeter, the brains can grow by two cubic centimeters, and the mass of the head will remain the same, which is very important, because the spine remained the same. Therefore, a slight reduction in the jaws and teeth allowed for a strong increase in brains. In addition, they had to be increased, because meat is more difficult to get: you have to brush off all kinds of hyenas, you have to make tools to cut this meat, you have to somehow catch this meat or find it first. Necessity and opportunity were perfectly combined, on a special graph it looks like a powerful leap in brain size. Until about 2.5 million years ago, the size of the brain, of course, increased little by little in the series of Australopithecines, but somehow neither shaky nor loose. And somewhere from 2.5 million years ago or even a little later, with the appearance of early Homo, a catastrophic growth in brain size begins. People settle outside Africa, which then happens repeatedly. And outside of Africa, of course, the conditions were different. There is, for example, an ecological niche of coastal gatherers. When people reached the seashore along East Africa, then along Arabia and further up to Australia, they engaged in coastal gathering, up to the modern era. That is, from the very first Homo (1 million – 800 thousand years) to the present, it was very pleasant to live along the shores of reservoirs: the sea throws a bunch of all kinds of food ashore. True, mountains of garbage arise from it, and from time to time you have to go somewhere, but this is a wonderful impetus for migration. So we rode to different islands, and eventually to Australia and around the world.
When people began to live in a temperate climate, where there is a cold winter, and began to use fire, such northern groups entered a phase of hyperhivility. This is a Heidelberg man and a Neanderthal man who began to eat a lot of meat. Not because they liked it beyond measure, but because they had nothing to eat: this is the ice Age, and apart from meat there was only some moss, yagel and nothing else. Therefore, they began to eat a lot of animals, meat. This also turned out to be a dead end, although the first Cro-Magnons, the first Sapiens who lived in Europe, ate almost the same way. For example, a paleodietological analysis made for a man from a cave in Romania showed that he was as mega-monstrous as the Neanderthals. But he is, by the way, a hybrid with a Neanderthal, so everything is quite logical.
The planet is big, people settled in different directions, faced with an increasing number of environments and types of habitats and found something to eat every time. Another thing is that a person evolves quickly, the selection is also quite powerful. Therefore, even in the last less than 50 thousand years, probably, several variants of the type of nutrition have already appeared for modern man. For example, Eskimos can eat three kilograms of fat in one sitting, and nothing will happen to them, no atherosclerosis. If an Indian is fed three kilograms of fat, he will immediately die. But an Indian can eat rice all his life, for example, which an Eskimo cannot do. There are people who eat exclusively fish, there are those who eat millet. It's wonderful that even in the most extreme variants, these are still just trends. Eskimos can also eat rice and potatoes, and Hindus can eat fatty foods. So modern man did not specialize too much, and we still did not have separate species. In addition, people move around all the time, mix, so the resulting adaptations never go into some kind of insanity, in specialization, as, for example, in anteaters. A person could probably go into such a specialization, but for this he needs several million more years.
So the main idea of human nutrition is to eat everything you have. And we are now living in a golden age when we can choose, we have everything in bulk, and this is literally in the last fifty years, probably, if not less. And now not everywhere, frankly speaking. We live in good conditions, but somewhere in Somalia, probably, people think completely differently. Therefore, it is often surprising that people choose what to eat and think, how would I not eat this, how would I run to lose weight. This is a very unusual condition for a person. Moreover, we have refrigerators, we have supermarkets, so humanity has created a lot of problems for itself. But the whole evolutionary past, from proconsuls onwards, is for us to be able to eat anything. So diets in some medical cases, of course, are useful, but if a person has no diseases, then he can eat, strictly speaking, anything. If a person feels good, then you can eat whatever you want. And, moreover, a person is so adapted to the consumption of anything that he can even spend some time on a mono diet, some kind of fruit-eating, for example. But still, obsessing over one thing does not lead to good, which is exemplified by the same paranthropes that have become herbivorous and which we now see in the form of fossils.
About the author: Stanislav Drobyshevsky – Candidate of Biological Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Biology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, scientific editor of the portal " <url>".
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09.09.2016