Food and Human Evolution

Food has played a major role in human evolution. The fact that we stand upright, that we can talk, that we have big brains; even traits such as altruism and a sense of fairness—all of these can be attributed largely to the kinds of food our ancestors ate and how they acquired it. When our hominid ancestors learned to make stone weapons, it enabling them to kill and butcher large animals. Eating and sharing meat led to our big brains and our “Machiavellian intelligence.”

We now face a modern food-related crisis. About 100 years ago, people began to abandon traditional diets in favor of refined, pre-packaged, factory-made foods. If you list the top ten crops receiving agricultural subsidies from USDA, no fruit or vegetable makes the list. This book describes how the rise of industrial food production unleashed an epidemic of metabolic disease that now threatens the very future of our species. 

America is being divided into two distinct populations — an obese majority that is subject to disease and early death, and a minority that remains largely free of these diseases. Diet-induced metabolic disease is beginning to pass directly from mothers to their children. Because of this inter?generational amplification, an evolutionary crisis is looming. 

This book offers a tantalizing range of information and ideas for readers interested in nutrition, anthropology, prehistoric studies, and human evolution, and food, diet, and human health as viewed from an overtly evolutionary perspective.