Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Did "Cavemen" eat oatmeal?
The term "Paleo Diet" is over used in my line of work. Go into any natural food store and you will see what I mean. Many companies use the term to market their products to consumers looking to eat the way the "Cavemen" ate more than 10,000 years ago in the Paleolithic Era. Just what exactly is the Paleo Diet?
The Paleolithic Diet consists of what food would have been generally available to our ancestors at the time; meat, berries, and nuts with no dairy or grains consumed. Homo sapiens living in the Paleolithic would have been nomadic hunter gatherers and not part of sedentary populations. Human populations didn't become sedentary until after the advent of farming.
New archaeological evidence suggests that the people of the Paleolithic were eating grains long before they even learned to farm them! Stone tools or grinding stones were discovered along with evidence of many different species of starchy granules mostly consisting of wild oats. "Cavemen" ate oats!
This is one of the many reason why I enjoy the field of Anthropology so much. Whenever new evidence in the field emerges we have to rethink and reformulate our ideas about our past. The field of Anthropology is always evolving. Pun intended.
I have posted the links with two very interesting articles below discussing the new exciting evidence.
http://theplate.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/11/ancient-oat-discovery-may-poke-more-holes-in-paleo-diet/
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/09/14/440292003/paleo-people-were-making-flour-32-000-years-ago
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