Thankfully, not everyone in the paleo movement begins their research under the assumption that we all evolved from banana-eating monkeys. And thankfully, there are now some videos online such as “Unlocking the Mystery of Life” that really help us to challenge this assumption.

Personally, I would like to see the paleo movement focus their energies on modern scientific health analysis, rather than wildly hypothetical discussions about evolutionary history.

Lastly, I wouldn’t be writing this if I did not think Ms. Minger was intelligent enough to consider challenging her own assumptions. (She certainly seems to be).

You are amazing. Thank you.

Just saying there is plenty of time for adaptation says nothing about the actual degree of change, if any at all.

However, David is probably wise to follow modern science, since the ancestral diet will always be just a guess. But I have similarly grown tired of the argument that every little human subpopulation has “evolved” to thrive on its unique local foods. I think we’re just not that different from one another.

I do love the way that people assert this without any proof and without doing any math.

If you mean our whole genome can’t change much in 50,000 (or 250,000 years), you’re correct. It isn’t that much different from a chimpanzee’s, which is an imortant point–a handful of changes can make huge differences.

Ned Kock has a nice little calculation about how quickly a beneficial genetic mutation can spread through a population, and it could be as short as 400 years. He even has a nice spreadsheet for you to play with the numbers. ( http://healthcorrelator.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-long-does-it-take-for-food-related.html ).

I’m really tired of the argument that evolution can only adapt us to dietary changes over huge time spans–which inevitiably leads to arguments about what our ancestors really ate. The evidence on what they ate is lousy, and we’ll never really know; it turns into something that smacks of religion very quickly.

But it doesn’t matter, because there has been plenty of time for us to adapt. The idealized caveman diet might not even be good for us–perhaps we’ve lost some adaptations they had. We just don’t know.

I base my dietary decisions on modern science, not conjectural paleoarchaeology. The modern science is confusing enough on its own.

The split between human and chimp ancestors was about 6 million years ago. During this time, our guts were forged in a relatively small area of Africa. Genetically modern humans appeared about 250,000 years ago, and they were still in Africa.

If true, then your argument that we are adapted to various diets because we inhabited vastly different areas doesn’t hold. That only happened after the African exodus about 50,000 years ago. There really hasn’t been much time for genetic change since then.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/22/AR2007022201007.html

What about daily consumption of insects as well…