Eating Half-Rotten Wildebeest Legs

When we talk about “paleo” diets, we arbitrarily tend to start with one set of ancestors, our most recent ones. I want to eat like Homo erectus or a Neanderthal or a stone age human, my neighbors testify. But why do we choose these particular ancestors as starting points? They do seem tough and admirable in a really strong five o’ clock shadow sort of way. But if we want to return to the diet our guts and bodies evolved to deal with, we should not be looking at our most recent ancestors.

Over on Scientific American, science writer Rob Dunn has a long and interesting piece about digestion (well, it’s true!) and the so-called paleo diets that have been gaining popularity. So, almonds and raw hummingbird for lunch.