caveman

I haven’t had a lot of time to read into the news (read: RSS feed articles) or keep up with current commentary (read: blogs) much lately. I don’t know why really, but it’s coming up on movie season and I’ve been going out a lot. (Well, guess I just solved that one.) But I found an article in the reader from back on August 16th. It’s interesting.

I don’t think I can follow a diet like this one, but I’ve thought of similar things before. It’s interesting to me how modern tribal instincts have adapted to the rise of civilization. We were around for a few dozen millions of years before we started planting half the seeds we were snacking on to have more snack next year. It’s only logical that the instincts and biological make-up would be slower to shift.

Men are more athletic than women because they have the capacity for more strength. They compete against one another for societal standing in order to win the favor of the most prized females to ensure the strongest offspring. Women have a higher fat content and their bodies circulate heat differently in order to bear children. Women are more apt to group-building activities. With a larger group of women there is more guidance for those offspring.

Today things are oriented more financially. Being physically fit is more about attraction than providing, but still important. Men compete more frequently in organized sports, but women develop complex social networks much faster.

Men use maps and guides and tend to have a better conceptual sense of direction. They are sometimes better at determining north, south, east, and west. Men had to travel large distances for food before farming.

Women use landmarks and experience to find their way. Women gathered closer, relatively, and their targets rarely moved. Recently, they’ve been shown to more accurately remember where certain foods were located in a grocery after visiting only once.

Over the millennia, we developed conservation systems in our bodies. There are certain points to which we gain weight and then rest at that weight for the rest of our lives. It developed to store fat reserves in time of famine. Today we have food in abundance. Walking to and from lunch, I typically see at least fifteen overweight people and at least five obese or morbidly obese people.

For millions of years we ate berries, nuts, and whatever we could kill. For a few hundred years we consumed vegetables and grains with some dairy. For the last seventy years we’ve consumed complex sugars, simple sugars, corn syrup, and liquid calories. It makes sense that our bodies can’t adjust quickly enough to avoid the decaying that comes along with such an abrupt change.