Nutritional ecology and diachronic trends in Paleolithic diet and health

Abstract

Modern nutritional studies have found that diverse diets are linked to lower infant mortality rates and longer life expectancies in humans. This is primarily because humans require more than fifty essential nutrients for growth and cell maintenance and repair; most of these essential nutrients must come from outside food sources rather than being manufactured by the body itself; and a diversity of food types is required to consume the full suite of essential nutrients necessary for optimal human health. These principles and their related affects on human adaptations and demography are the hallmarks of a theoretical paradigm defined as nutritional ecology. This essay applies concepts derived from nutritional ecology to the study of human evolution. Principles of nutritional ecology are applied to the study of the Middle‐to‐Upper Paleolithic transition in order to broadly illustrate the interpretive ramifications of this approach. At any stage in human evolution, those hominid populations that chose to diversify their subsistence base may have had a selective advantage over competitors who restricted their diet principally to one food type, such as terrestrial mammals.

Thirty thousand-year-old evidence of plant food processing

“…Such a capacity for complex food plant processing could be a part of a Mid-Upper Paleolithic behavioral package (2,23,24), with consequences for diversified subsistence strategies and demographic changes in these populations (25).…”

Climatic Correlates of Human Subsistence: A Global Analysis

“…A fundamental principle of human health and nutrition is that diverse diets increase the overall health patterns by lowering infant mortality rates and increasing average life expectancy (Hockett and Haws, 2003). That the most widespread form of food production is an extensive and mixed strategy would account for the apparent paradox between the human necessity to buffer environmental fluctuations, best achieved by retaining a more generalist and flexible approach to food procurement, and the expansion of agriculture.…”

A unique hominin menu dated to 1.95 million years ago

“…Early hominins exploited a wide variety of habitats and now it appears, a diversity of resources within these habitats. Modern humans thrive on diverse foods, and a diverse diet may have been key to our lineage's success (16), although the aquatic component may have deep roots given that some nonhuman primates consume some aquatic foods (17). Braun et al (7) justifiably did not address whether the FwJj20 carcasses were obtained through hunting or scavenging.…”