Somewhere a Palaeontologist Is Crying: Difference between revisions

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 * The [https://web.archive.org/web/20100208100808/http://www.thepaleodiet.com/nutritional_tools/recipes.shtml "Paleolithic" Diet], which claims to be the healthiest diet due to supposedly being based on what our ancestors ate during the bloody ''ice ages''. The problems inherent within this claim are numerous:
 ** Human diet was incredibly varied even then. Depending on the climate, early man would eat either nothing but fruit and possibly fish, or nothing but meat and the occassional root.
-** The plan makes the false assumption that modern humans are genetically identical to their stone-age ancestors, ignoring modern evolutionary theory. The prevelance of lactose tolerance among African, European, and West- and South-Asian adults; lactose tolerance is only useful if you've domesticated the cow—currently [http://archaeology.about.com/od/dterms/a/domestication.htm believed] to have happened around 7000 BC—and herd them in a big way (which East Asians as a rule did not do, preferring to use them as beasts of burden).<ref>Most mammalian species lose the ability to produce lactase--the enzyme that allows one to digest lactose--as adults; the retention of the ability to produce lactase after weaning is only useful to that weird creature that continues to drink milk later on. The branches of the species that didn't--East Asians and the native peoples of Oceania and the New World--retain the older, more normal feature, lactose intolerance.</ref>
+** The plan makes the false assumption that modern humans are genetically identical to their stone-age ancestors, ignoring modern evolutionary theory. The prevelance of lactose tolerance among African, European, and West- and South-Asian adults; lactose tolerance is only useful if you've domesticated the cow—currently [https://web.archive.org/web/20110707075011/http://archaeology.about.com/od/dterms/a/domestication.htm believed] to have happened around 7000 BC—and herd them in a big way (which East Asians as a rule did not do, preferring to use them as beasts of burden).<ref>Most mammalian species lose the ability to produce lactase--the enzyme that allows one to digest lactose--as adults; the retention of the ability to produce lactase after weaning is only useful to that weird creature that continues to drink milk later on. The branches of the species that didn't--East Asians and the native peoples of Oceania and the New World--retain the older, more normal feature, lactose intolerance.</ref>
 *** On a related note, the hominid digestive system was remarkably more tolerant of microbes than ours are today. Remember, the cleanest thing those guys would eat off of was their bare hands. If we would try that today, a great deal of us would get a nasty case of food poisoning.
 ** From the linked website, every single recipe involves some sort of minute preperation (spices, minced vegetables, olive oil). If a paleolithic human tried to dedicate their free time to acquiring all those ingredients, they'd die of starvation or predation first.