Yes, humans evolved in the age of agriculture.
Per the end of the piece, this doesn’t really invalidate the paleo diet theory. It makes sense that we would have adapted to milk; it’s a useful high-protein food source. There would have been less evolutionary pressure to be able to handle grain, because the ill effects don’t occur until later in life, past child-bearing age.
But the paleo diet “fad” does not completely avoid dairy products. Some recommend it and others do avoid it. Most will say that you should go without it for a couple months and then reintroduce it, to check for maladaptation.
The New York Times gets it wrong. Again. If their snarky food advice is wrong, what about their politics?
I don’t have encyclopedic recall to cite all the specific cases but I am fairly certain that there were both migration and cultural diffusion as well as independent discovery (or whatever the term is). Agriculture wasn’t just a product of the cradle of civilization.
Homo Sapiens have been around 200,000 years so it seems strange that the last 12-14,000 years have been unparalleled in human development. But considering the materials used and what happens to most things over time, it isn’t surprising that we don’t know much about early humans.
It could very well be that the last ice age, err the current ice age, was so hard on societies that they were able to do little more than survive. But consider that the last ice age started something like 100,000 years ago, after homo sapiens already existed for 100,000 years. There were 100,000 years of climate favorable to human development. At this time, sea levels were much lower and places most likely to be inhabited are now deep underwater. Underwater archaeology deals mostly with shipwrecks so there is a lot left undiscovered, if it can be discovered at all. Exiting the last period of glaciation was really catastrophic on a global scale with megafloods that drastically changed Earth’s topography and sea levels.
People, scientists included, forget that we are possibly exiting the current ice age through natural processes regardless of any impacts humans have on the environment and that natural process will eventually lead to the end of the current ice age no matter what. This means that there will be no ice and this is the natural state of Earth when not in an ice age. Aside from the period when the ice sheets melted, warming has been very beneficial to humans. And if we are not exiting the current ice age, then glaciation could return and that would be pretty horrible.
We cannot stop the cycles of ice ages. We do not even know for sure how they happen even if there are theories and models on the matter.
Archaeology has been pretty exciting field to follow recently with advancements in DNA and all kinds of exciting discoveries about our recent past, not to mention the discovery of new forms of hominid like Denisovans, Homo Floresiensis, and even people not represented by the fossil record but suspected to exist through DNA.
Well, I guess I got part of that wrong as the current ice age has lasted longer than homo sapiens have been around. I am not sure of the exact dates assigned to cycles of glaciation prior to the last one.
Of course there have been adaptions since the paleolithic, and most (but not all) recognize this.
Adaptations more recently acquired (such as animal milk) are less evenly distributed, and less robust, than older adaptations (such as meat eating). And very, very old adaptations (such fruit only diets) are all but lost. It follows a curve of sorts. The two questions are: (1) Where is the sweet spot on that curve for everyone, and (2) where is the sweet spot on that curve for you, personally?
Amylase genes for digesting starch didn’t get quite settled out, and they differ by haplogroup (pubmed paywalled). That possibly has dietary implications.
And going back to an article in the NY Times from some months ago:
As a side note, we didn’t actually “invent” fire. We may have invented better ways to start one, cook with it, or build an oven, but I’m pretty sure we can’t claim it as something that was ever patentable.
The human genome contains a gene which allows the human body to manufacture Vitamin C. As a result of agriculture, and the widespread availability of citrus and other produce containing the vitamin, that gene eventually became inactive.
I’m wondering if the same thing is happening today with Vitamin D. The dairy industry has been loading milk with Vitamin D since 1933, and one of the biggest problems in health care (at least in the Mid-Atlantic states) is Vitamin D deficiency. I don’t think lack of sunlight has any particular impact, because it doesn’t take much for a normal person to generate his or her daily requirement. I’m wondering if the body is losing its capacity.
Actually, our ancestors lost the use of L-gulonolactone oxidase (and became unable to synthesize vitamin C) some 63 million years ago. It’s not a recent mutation.