The Ancestral Health model which is often, unfortunately in
some regards, coined ‘paleo-’ is based upon the idea that our body (and mind)
is, for want of a better word, designed as a consequence of our environment.
Over the course of Human evolution certain environmental factors were
sufficiently strong enough to put pressure on our species to cause a culling of
the population (‘thinning of the herd’), so much so that only those who had
specific favourable traits for those conditions were able to survive and
propagate, and thus certain sub-lines of Human populations died out leaving us
as the solitary remnants of this, at one time, varied species. There is,
however, evidence that there was interbreeding between homo sapiens and these
other lineages most notably the Neanderthal and Denisovans, but regardless of
this fact, what we see today as modern Human beings are a homogenous mix of ancestral
genomes.
There were many environmental changes throughout our
history, one of the most pivotal was the receding forests that pressured our
ancestors to leave their, at one time, home of the tree-tops and begin to make
the ever expanding savannah their new habitat; but that and the huge change it
made in our physiology and mind is a story for another time. Another pivotal
moment came, in evolutionary terms, only a blink of an eye ago,
when man began to change from being at the peril of the environment to
understanding how to manipulate it. This was the agricultural revolution.
Agriculture began about 11,000 years ago in what used to be
called the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. It was composed mainly of Iraq
and many of the surrounding regions such as Iran, Turkey, Cyprus and other
lands depending on the time period. Because of the change in climate over the
years the area waxed and waned and today it is mostly desert, but at this time
in history it had, relative to the surrounding areas, rich soil fed by the
major rivers of the area (Tigris, Euphrates and to a lesser extent the Nile) that
made successful propagation possible. This stability, amongst other factors,
allowed the Humans populating the area to develop many traits that we now
consider to be common place such as writing and arithmetic to be realised,
which is why this area is also known as the cradle of civilisation (not the
only one, but the most commonly known).
The idea and implementation of agriculture afforded the
population a stability which enabled the rise of civilisation in these areas. This
then led onto various facets of current civilisation such as economies,
governance and militaries amongst other key features, and as we know, all of
these things like to scale, so the civilisation began to spread, sometimes by
mimicry, more often however, by aggressive negotiations. The end result of this
expansion was the eventual ‘adoption’ of the agricultural model almost
worldwide today.
This spread didn’t happen overnight, in fact agriculture did
not become entrenched in most countries until about 2,000 years ago; and this
is where part of the issue lies. Up until this point Humanity had only been
exposed to a hunter and gatherer diet. This diet was based upon chemicals that
have been part of the Earths environment since life began on this planet. These
chemicals that we now call nutrients are the only keys that precisely fit the
locks of our genome. The advent of agriculture changed the landscape, which
introduced foods of types and quantities that our genome had very little
exposure to, and therefore hadn’t developed mechanisms with which to deal.
We’ll cover this in later pieces, as genomic adaptation, especially since the
realisation of epi-genetics, which created a new layer of intricacy, has made
an already sophisticated picture even more complex, albeit elegantly.
Over time not only did our recent ancestors learn to
successfully propagate crops and breed animals, they began to genetically
engineer these organisms through selective breeding to encourage certain
properties to emerge. So specific signals that enticed our distant ancestors
such as sweet (sugar) and fat to seek out and consume certain foods were made
more abundant, which as we’ll see has a massive impact on physiology and
behaviour. And this brings up an important point, even if we strictly adhered
to the types, proportions etc of foods that our distant ancestors consumed, it
would still not be an exact facsimile of the diet, as the foods are vastly
different to what was available in our long past history.
However this is where many of the critics (and even some
proponents) of the ancestral model get the wrong idea. People such as Loren
Cordain aren’t suggesting that we need to eat or live identically to how our
ancient ancestors did; they (individuals like Loren) are simply suggesting an
elegant premise of basing your nutrition and activities on the signals that our
genome developed upon. These signals (which we’ll cover in more detail in
subsequent pieces) are the precise information codes that instruct our genome
to express itself optimally. Signals that were not part of our evolutionary
environment, especially so since the industrial age, do not interact optimally with our genome and thus either cause an
inadequate expression which limits our ability to thrive, or in the worst case
scenario cause degeneration and disease. These signals, if at all possible and
pretty common sense really, should be avoided.
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