Hunted-Gatherer? Lucy, Compassion, and Cooperation

You might be as fascinated as I am by the recent finding of stone tool butchering 3.4 million years ago, pushing back the earliest meat-eating of our pre-human ancestors by about a million years. Well, in my preliminary research on the topic, I came across this gem about a 2006 book by anthrolopolist Robert Sussman. But instead of touting the 'Man as Hunter' paradigm, he went about demonstrating why we are not simply killers, but agents of compassion, cooperation, and caring. Turns out our ancestors help to highlight why. This great quote concerns Australopithecus afarensis (you may know her as 'Lucy'), the pre-human ancestor of (first human) Homo habilis:

"Australopithecus afarensis was an edge species," adds Sussman. They could live in the trees and on the ground and could take advantage of both. "Primates that are edge species, even today, are basically prey species, not predators," Sussman argues.

The predators living at the same time as Australopithecus afarensis were huge and there were 10 times as many as today. There were hyenas as big as bears, as well as saber-toothed cats and many other mega-sized carnivores, reptiles and raptors. Australopithecus afarensis didn't have tools, didn't have big teeth and was three feet tall. He was using his brain, his agility and his social skills to get away from these predators. "He wasn't hunting them," says Sussman. "He was avoiding them at all costs."

Approximately 6 percent to 10 percent of early humans were preyed upon according to evidence that includes teeth marks on bones, talon marks on skulls and holes in a fossil cranium into which sabertooth cat fangs fit, says Sussman. The predation rate on savannah antelope and certain ground-living monkeys today is around 6 percent to 10 percent as well.

Sussman and Hart provide evidence that many of our modern human traits, including those of cooperation and socialization, developed as a result of being a prey species and the early human's ability to out-smart the predators. These traits did not result from trying to hunt for prey or kill our competitors, says Sussman.

"One of the main defenses against predators by animals without physical defenses is living in groups," says Sussman. "In fact, all diurnal primates (those active during the day) live in permanent social groups. Most ecologists agree that predation pressure is one of the major adaptive reasons for this group-living. In this way there are more eyes and ears to locate the predators and more individuals to mob them if attacked or to confuse them by scattering. There are a number of reasons that living in groups is beneficial for animals that otherwise would be very prone to being preyed upon."

By all means, it's important to note the timeline of scavenging and hunting to the evolution of our species and the implications for modern day health. But I think that the 'Man as Hunter' idea is well understood in most cases, and taken to extremes in some cases. We are not simply the selfish, solitary man-sharks that modern culture teaches us to be.

Especially for men, I've noticed a degree of machismo that seeps into the evolutionary interpretation -- an unnatural alpha-male complex. Man as unemotional. Man as tough. Man as killer. Believe me, Clint Eastwood and John Wayne are lone wolf archetypes that wouldn't have lasted long in the Paleolithic. This is worth reiterating: Don't be subject to unnatural Neolithic social isolation or a dramatic misrepresentation of your true nature. We are compassionate, expressive, social beings in addition to the selfish, competitive ideal you know so well. The effort to heal our fragmented communities and work cooperatively to solve big problems requires this simple recognition.

Food Ethics: Sense and Sentience

Sentience refers to the ability of an entity to have subjective perceptual experiences. It is distinct from consciousness, which covers the mind and thought. Why is this important?

In animal rights philosophy, sentience means that animals have the ability to experience pleasure and pain. They feel pain, therefore killing and eating them is wrong. The problem is that scientists consider plants to be sentient too, since they can feel, touch, taste, smell, and respond to their environments.

Indeed, the biochemical pathways are different, but that's true of every living thing: a daffodil is not quite a venus fly trap is not quite a honey bee is not quite a goldfish is not quite an octopus is not quite alligator is not quite a monkey is not quite a human. All life (plant and animal) varies in fundamental biochemistry. The point is that plants and animals have fundamental biochemistry, and are sentient. If an animal is sentient, wrong to hurt; if a plant is sentient, wrong to hurt. Clearly, under this ethical model, we have nothing to eat.

Some vegans argue that plants are not sentient, but that would never fly with a scientist. Smarter vegans argue that plants are sentient but still unconscious, which is true, but takes the issue away from sensation and into complex neurological thought, which is just an attempt to confuse the topic. The best vegan rebuttal I found:

Even if it’s true that plants are the most sentient life on Earth, veganism would still be the minimum standard of decency. This follows from the simple fact that animals are reverse protein factories, consuming multiple times the protein in plant food that they produce in protein from their flesh and bodily fluids.

Of course, this is nonsense on multiple levels. First, animals are not just made out of protein. Second, a harmonious biotic community requires inconsistent "factories" to maintain the circle of life. Third, if animals are 'wasting' the essence of life, then the ethical thing would be to kill the animals. Clearly, this argument is flawed.

As for the idea that plants are less sentient than animals? This statement would be due to identification bias; in essence, we confuse their consciousness with their sentience and conclude that plants don't appear to be as sentient as we are. But looks can be deceiving. According to the Human Genome Project, we have about 25,000 genes -- the rice grain has twice that. Truth is: as lifeforms, we didn't evolve more. We evolved differently. Plant species exhibit vast diversity and powerful sophistication in response to and engagement with their natural environments. They can smell smoke, see sunlight, and -- you guessed it -- feel a limb get ripped off.

Pain and sentience are incomplete arenas to conduct a moral discourse. We need big picture morality, one that takes into account the health of the biotic community, weighs opportunity costs, and questions underlying assumptions.

Must see video:

Food Chemistry and the Narrative Fallacy

"... far too often, we scientists focus on details while ignoring the larger context... we pin our efforts and our hopes on one isolated nutrient at a time... We oversimplify and disregard the infinite complexity of nature." - Colin T. Campbell, The China Study (pp. 19-20)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is no chump. The Times calls his book, The Black Swan, one of the 12 most influential since World War II. The popularly revered author Malcolm Gladwell credits him as a central influence. Taleb cast warnings all the way up to the 2008 financial crisis, and then made a fortune from it. It's an irony that such a wise mind's message to the world is that the world is unwise. In his own words:

We love the tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the visual, the social, the embedded, the emotional laden, the salient, the stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic, the official, the scholarly-sounding verbiage (b******t), the pompous Gaussian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Academie Française, Harvard Business School, the Nobel Prize, dark business suits with white shirts and Ferragamo ties, the moving discourse, and the lurid. Most of all we favor the narrated.

Alas, we are not manufactured, in our current edition of the human race, to understand abstract matters — we need context. Randomness and uncertainty are abstractions. We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened. In other words, we are naturally shallow and superficial — and we do not know it. This is not a psychological problem; it comes from the main property of information.

At the core of this philosophical abstraction is one very key point: We don't know, but want to know so badly that we force it. We need to own complex information so badly that the truth is lost in translation. You see this in the financial world all the time: "The Dow Jones fell today

due to rising oil cost in the Middle East." The truth is that the Dow went through a myriad of unpredictable events that depended on a myriad of unpredictable environments so complex that no mathematical model could describe it. But the next day oil costs will fall and the Dow will too, so they'll try to find some other factor to explain it all. This is oversimplification, an arrogant display of command over information when the simple truth is that we will never truly control intricately complex systems like world financial economics or, as I'm arguing, food chemistry and its interaction with the human body.

To pompously declare that we can test tube our way to good health is to ignore the infinitely complex nature of food, the human body, and the synergistic effects of nutrient combinations. Science should be a part of the big picture, not the big picture itself. Thankfully, its beginning to sound like people are waking up to a better paradigm.

"People don't eat nutrients, they eat foods. And foods can behave quite differently from the nutrients that they contain... But while nutritionism has its roots in a scientific approach to food, it’s important to remember that it is not a science but an ideology, and that the food industry, journalism, and government bear just as much responsibility for its conquest of our minds and diets… Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished." -Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food

Revisiting Human Evolution: Part 2

In Part 1 I went over how reproduction is at the heart of evolution in order to clear up any misconceptions about what evolution means for the modern lifestyle. Now I'd like to turn to an equally important and foundational topic that will further what evolution means for our bodies.

The Human Timeline

A lot of dates get thrown around about our hunter-gatherer past. I want to tackle this topic strategically, so I'll start with the most conservative interpretation first. This is from Geoff Bond's Deadly Harvest:

We have our humanlike beginnings with East African Homo erectus over 1,000,000 years ago. Out of that population, Homo sapiens arose and existed for 190,000 years before leaving Africa about 60,000 years ago. This period, from over 1,000,000 years ago to 60,000 years ago is critical—it is our formative era. It is the time when the African environment forged the bodies that we possess today...

Geologists have a convenient, often-used epoch for this approximate time period—the Pleistocene, which runs from 1,600,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago. However, I want to conclude the formative era earlier, at about 60,000 years ago. Since our ancestors spent this time entirely in Africa, I will call this critical formative era the “African Pleistocene.”

Now, you might be thinking that this time period ignores a huge chunk of significant history, but I want to highlight the importance of this message. This was a long time that a relatively small number of humans -- all of them -- evolved in a relatively small corner of the world. Many conditions were relatively stable throughout this million-year period compared to what happened to our species after the African Pleistocene, 60,000 years ago, when we left Africa and spread slowly throughout the rest of the world. The takeaway: our species is a tropical one whose homeland was a small pocket of Africa in what is now Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. Bond's "formative era" is the most indisputable core of human history that cannot be nit-picked or challenged. This is why it's worth noting before moving on to a more moderate, but still significant, timeline.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution dates humans according to the genus Homo, starting with Homo habilis. This is the 2.4 million year number that you've probably heard. Homo habilis had a slightly different physique more adapted to tree climbing, due to its tree-dwelling ancestor, Australopithecines. The takeaway: habilis used stone tools, foraged plants, and scavenged animal foods. That's right, we ate paleo two and a half million years ago.

Now lets talk about the time period after the African Pleistocene, 60,000 to 10,000 years ago. This was the time when our species left Africa and spread over the world, entered new geographies and climates, and saw some degree of differentiation, what we now call 'race'. While there was a great deal of differentiation in terms of adaptation to climate/environment, many important things stayed the same, but I'd like to highlight two: our hunter-gatherer diets and the physical movements necessary for survival. Thus, throughout all of human history in the Paleolithic we ate specific types of foods and performed specific types of natural movements all the way up to the agricultural revolution (the Neolithic).

So hopefully now you can recognize a million-year core of indisputably formative human history, but also the preceding million and a half years and how that's relevant, and finally the tumultuous 50,000 years before the agricultural revolution and how that doesn't contradict diet or exercise either.

Revisiting Human Evolution: Part 1

I've noticed some arbitrary dates and misconceptions about evolution being thrown around, and I admit that I've done so myself during heated discussions with Paleolithic nay-sayers. Make no mistake: evolution and ancient human history are the linchpins of the modern paleo lifestyle philosophy. The foundational science must be indisputable; more importantly, it must be clearly understood by its adherents, who are the ambassadors for the cause. The paleo lifestyle is only as legitimate as the rationale that flows from its foundational science.

This may seem like a trifling distinction from what is already known, but people in both the paleo and vegan camps hold false notions. There is the ridiculous notion held by some people that one day we humans can evolve into pure vegetarians if we would just eat veggies for an eon or two. I've also heard paleo leaders state that we haven't yet evolved to eat grains, because it's too new to our diets. This line of thought displays a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. Allow me to demonstrate why we will never evolve into vegetarians, and why we will never develop the ability to fully tolerate Neolithic foods.

Reproduction and the Phenomenon of Random Variation

Consider siblings. They come from the same genetic heritage, but have vastly different genetic expressions. My own brother is taller and heavier and has much lighter skin than I do. This is pretty easy to understand. Genes vary slightly in the offspring of all species, and that variation is random. This is true for all life on earth, even bacteria.

The reason that a species changes over time (evolves) is because certain small variations give certain genes an advantage at reproducing. To be clear, the 'success' or 'strength' of a gene depends entirely on it's ability to reproduce, and to reproduce at a higher frequency.

So unless meat-eating genes cause certain death before sexual maturity (reproduction), natural human vegetarians will never exist. And since grain consumption does not affect rates of human reproduction, those celiac genes won't disappear either.

Barefooting

NYC Barefoot Run

What a weekend! The 1st Annual NYC Barefoot Run was a huge success, and it was great to celebrate the sport with other enthusiasts. I had the chance to meet some great leaders in the movement, including John Durant, Erwan Le Corre, Jason Robillard, Daniel Howell, and Barefoot Ted. Thanks to the volunteers and sponsors that made this awesome event a reality.

The star of the show was Dan Lieberman, the Harvard University scientist who studies the anatomical efficiencies of human locomotion. In a truly remarkable presentation, he covered the science behind the sport from early human history up to Newtonian physics. Here are some fascinating points from his presentation:

We evolved to run. Endurance running was essential to Paleolithic humans in order to procure big game animals for food. (Persistence hunting is the running down of an animal through tracking and chasing, where the animal is literally run to death. It was a major turning point in our physical and mental development.)

In nature, humans are especially remarkable distance runners. By almost any measure, mankind sucks. We are simply slow and weak compared to most animals, but when it comes to endurance, we shine. Our sweat glands, and the beautifully precise mechanisms of our legs and cardiovascular system, allow us to do things other animals can't, which is why we are able to literally run an antelope to death. Prey animals cannot gallop and pant at the same time and they do not sweat like we do, which means they lose the ability to thermo-regulate (death by heat stroke). Here's a modern example:

We evolved to run. Barefoot. Nike rose to popularity in the 1970s and revolutionized the way humans run. They put big soft heels on their shoes that led to people favoring the heel strike instead of the ancient and original forefoot strike. Turns out, our bodies respond to heel striking with serious chronic injuries (7 in 10 runners per year), and shoes disallow proper muscle and bone development of the lower leg. Improper form effects the entire body; your foot is your foundation!

For another great recap of the run, check out this blog post from my main caveman, Colin Pistell: http://www.fifth-ape.com/blog/2010/10/12/1st-annual-nyc-barefoot-run.html

Correct Running Technique

Forefoot strike. Yes, you should land with the ball of the foot. It should land softly and gently and should help absorb impact throughout the body. The goal is to make the impact silent.

Run underneath your center of gravity. In other words, do not reach out in front of you or push off the ground at the end of your stride.

Short stride, quick cadence. This means making abrupt movements with your legs, and bringing your back leg up to the front much more quickly.

Less bounce, more glide. Your head should not be bobbing much at all. The movement instead should be smooth and elegant.

Tall, straight torso. Arms help to balance, but should move with minimal energy expended.

It will take some time to relearn how to run, but have fun with it and don't be scared to experiment to see what works for you. If something hurts, stop and evaluate. Also, expect a long period of muscle development in the feet, so start slow.

Many experts this weekend advised starting with no shoes at all rather than using minimalist shoes. Daniel Howell says the tactile feedback of a bare foot will help the process.

Beyond Barefoot Running

Erwan Le Corre highlighted the fact that running is only one of many natural movements that are meant to be performed barefoot. Your body will also benefit from lifting, crawling, climbing, jumping, and walking sans shoes. Check out these awe-inspiring videos of Erwan Le Corre himself:

Achieving Natural Posture

An anthropological perspective on posture is almost impossible to ask for, but we have a heroine in Stanford grad Esther Gokhale. Just a stone's throw from where I grew up, Gokhale has been practicing perhaps the only anthropologically-focused pain center in the USA. She traveled the world looking closely at tribal cultures that are devoid of back problems and now teaches natural posture solutions for people struggling with chronic pain. Turns out, the way we were taught, by parents and doctors alike, is the way that leads to complications all over the body, from the foot to the back to the neck. Here are some key points for achieving a more natural posture:

Forget the S-curve. A true spine forms more of a J, where the bottom part of the J is your butt sticking out, and your upper spine is flat up all the way through the neck. Years of sitting unnaturally and carrying backpacks are the likely culprit of our modern incorrect posture.

Yes, stick out your butt. A bent-over posture looks timid and unattractive. Not only does natural posture make you a tiny bit taller, but it also makes you look confident and healthy, and it's better for all your working parts, including muscle development and safe movement.

Use your inner corset. In order to correctly pop it like its hot, experiment with lightly wrapping your core muscles to form a tight cylinder around your stomach and lower back. If breathing is impeded, you're wrapping too tightly. Instead, tighten your obliques while relaxing the rectus abdominus (the front of the stomach).

Breathing is an essential part of your posture. In fact, breathing will change the size and structure of your rib cage. People are told all kinds of things: breathe deep in the chest, breathe with your stomach, etc. The truth is that natural breathing is a combination of stomach, chest, and upper back. Go ahead and play around to find your comfort zone.

Hinge at the hip. Bending should not change the 'core' of your back. Simply hinge at the hip rather than the waist.

EXERCISE: Raise your hands in front to elbow height then move them slowly away from each other while breathing in slowly, filling your stomach mostly, and your chest and back, all the while imagining that the top of your head is being pulled skyward. Feel yourself get taller and taller, and then let the air fall out of your chest while maintaining the position in your back and stomach. Drop your hands, breathe freely, and feel the straight line of your spine and the firmness in your core.

For more detail from the expert herself, check out her talk at Google: