Food for Thought

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We walk on two legs, carry around enormous brains and have colonized every corner of the globe. Anthropologists and biologists have long sought to understand how our lineage came to differ so profoundly from the primate norm in these ways, and over the years all manner of hypotheses aimed at explaining each of these oddities have been put forth. But a growing body of evidence indicates that these miscellaneous quirks of humanity in fact have a common thread: they are largely the result of natural selection acting to maximize dietary quality and foraging efficiency. Changes in food availability over time, it seems, strongly influenced our hominid ancestors. Thus, in an evolutionary sense, we are very much what we ate.

Accordingly, what we eat is yet another way in which we differ from our primate kin. Contemporary human populations the world over have diets richer in calories and nutrients than those of our cousins, the great apes. So when and how did our ancestors' eating habits diverge from those of other primates? Further, to what extent have modern humans departed from the ancestral dietary pattern?

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This article is a rather good overview of the current “standard model” of big brain evolution in humans and brings some interesting new techniques to the investigation. Particularly the comparison of calorie usage for various functions across primate species seems to be an innovative and promising investigative strategy.

The problem with this kind of Science is the tendency to draw big conclusions from small amounts of data.

[ December 03, 2002: Message edited by: JimmyBrogan ]