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J Scott Hill

Food For Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...eat-based-diet-made-us-smarter

evolution human thought food diet

shared by J Scott Hill on 29 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw — fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. When they ventured down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.
  • "You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers.
  • "What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major significant factors in the evolution of our own species," Aiello says.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • cut marks on animal bones appeared
  • that could have been made only by a sharp tool.
  • But Aiello's favorite clue is somewhat ickier — it's a tapeworm. "The closest relative of human tapeworms are tapeworms that affect African hyenas and wild dogs," she says.
  • Besides better taste, cooked food had other benefits — cooking killed some pathogens on food.
  • It breaks up the long protein chains, and that makes them easier for stomach enzymes to digest. "
  • collagen is very hard to digest. But if you heat it, it turns to jelly."
  • starchy foods like turnips, cooking gelatinizes the tough starch granules and makes them easier to digest too. Even just softening food — which cooking does — makes it more digestible. In the end, you get more energy out of the food.
  • J Scott Hill on 29 Jan 13
     
    Interesting audio piece on cooked food, meat, and the evolution of our big brains.
J Scott Hill

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race - 5 views

www.ditext.com/...mistake.html

shared by J Scott Hill on 12 Mar 13 - Cached
  • With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.
  • revisionist interpretation
  • Just count our advantages
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history
    • J Scott Hill
      J Scott Hill on 12 Mar 13
       
      Thomas Hobbes: 1651 Leviathan
  • nasty, brutish, and short
  • progressivist perspective
  • Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries.
  • How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?
  • indirect test:
  • these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors.
  • obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania.
    • J Scott Hill
      J Scott Hill on 12 Mar 13
       
      1st indirect test: looking at contemporary h-g...find their diet is adequate and they work very little.
  • the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients.
  • Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."
  • paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.
  • Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.
  • the average height of hunger-gatherers
  • a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor.
  • Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.
  • The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition, (today just three high-carbohydrate plants -- wheat, rice, and corn -- provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed.
  • many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease.
  • deep class divisions.
  • there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others.
  • since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth).
  • Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000,
  • fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.
  • I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.
  • Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.
J Scott Hill

In Central Africa, Bitter Cassava Is Linked to Mental Deficits - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...linked-to-mental-deficits.html

shared by J Scott Hill on 25 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Konzo, a disease that comes from eating bitter cassava that has not been prepared properly — that is, soaked for days to break down its natural cyanide — has long been known to cripple children.
  • In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dr. Boivin and colleagues gave tests of mental acuity and dexterity to three groups of children. Two groups were from a village near the Angolan border with regular konzo outbreaks: Half had leg problems; half did not but had cyanide in their urine. The third was from a village 125 miles away with a similar diet but little konzo because residents routinely detoxified cassava before cooking it.
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