Early Humans Likely Ate Carbs and Sugary Foods | Hacker News Reader

Early Humans Likely Ate Carbs and Sugary Foods

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37 pointsgmays63 comments

There’s many theories but one that I learned was that women and children provides the bulk of the calories for Early Humans. While the men went out and hunted for meat they also relied on the fruit harvested by the women and children. That would give them the energy necessary for trekking and hunting.

> fruit harvested

Also tubers.

So we’re expected to believe each man is carry a basket of rapidly deteriorating fruit (and tubers).

Or a knapsack of dried fatty meat with a fairly indefinite shelf life.

Maybe they took dried fruit

Maybe they took both.

Ok.

Fruit doesn't go bad in a day.

The Inca had a method of drying potatoes such that they were stable for multiple years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu%C3%B1o

But the Inca lived to late for this discussion. They already had advanced agriculture. For evolutionary terms, the time before agriculture and the time of the predecessors of homo sapiens are more relevant, because that time span was larger by orders of magnitude.

Everyone participated in everything. Getting food was basically 90% of everyone's day. When berries were in season, which might only be a week or two, everyone picked berries. When the salmon migrated, everyone worked the river. And then, when there were no plants in season and the only calories were from hunting, everyone supported the hunt.

The idea of four guys going into the woods and spearing a deer is a myth, a false parallel to modern sport hunting. Beaters pushed the prey towards kill zones. Fires could be set to get game moving. Fences would be biult to funnel game. And everyone was involved in processing the kill. Sure, maybe the big guys threw the spears but that was actually a small part of the process. The safest kill would always have been that where the animal injured itself first, no big guy muscles required. So there were plenty of jobs for all abilities.

How do you know this? Anthropology?

Well, there are heaps of hunting structures left out there, and infamous places where animals were run off cliffs. But also, just watch anyone trying to catch an animal, be it a dog or a buffalo. Good luck trying to sneek within spear range. What most do is get a bunch of people together to scare the animal into a particular direction or place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_kite

https://explorersweb.com/hiker-discovers-iron-age-reindeer-f...

https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/northern-yukon...

>> The most technologically sophisticated is the caribou fence complex. Ten of these complexes have been studied by archaeologists in the northern Yukon and nearly 40 others have been recorded in adjacent Alaska. The oldest surviving fences date to the early 1800s, but oral history suggests fences may have been used for thousands of years; they were last used about 1910.

>But also, just watch anyone trying to catch an animal

Have you seen non-tech office workers solving computer problems? Gathering around, hitting the case, pressing random buttons, calling their friends, who are also clueless, on the phone, everyone advising everyone else on what to do next? This is exactly how programmers and SREs deal with the same problems according to you.

And yet present day hunter gatherer societies tend to have extremely strict gender roles. For example the idea of a woman going on a hunt is not taboo, but simply unthinkable, maybe similar to what we would think about a man taking lactose pills to breastfeed. At least that is what I read in Sabine Kugler's excellent books. So somehow I doubt everyone participated in everything.

Selection bias. Notice how most present day groups are in hot and relatively stable climates, areas where one can hunt/gather all year. Look to past groups in the north where seasonal changes meant the window for any particular food source was always limited. When there is only a short window, it is maximum effort from everyone.

The same is true for agriculture. Even today, with all of our mechanical wizardry, farmers on the plains still pull their kids out of school to help during harvest.

Your previous comment was far too absolute in its wording and was thus incorrect, as evidenced by GPs counterexample. "Four guys going into the woods and spearing an [animal]" is definitely not "a myth".

Note that many early humans lived in "hot and relatively stable climates".

Fruit were completely different and a lot less sugary and more starchy than they are today. We wouldn’t recognize most fruit neither by look nor by taste.

https://www.businessinsider.com/what-foods-looked-like-befor...

I don't think this is new. The idea always was that proto-humans had to live in an environment rich with energy dense food (fruit) prior to growing a brain large enough to figure out how to make barbeque. Otherwise you never get to the barbeque capable brain. The whole point of making fire and therefore consuming cooked meat is that now you can migrate to places that don't have abundant sources of energy dense food.

Cooking also increases the energy available from plant matter, particularly starchy tubers.

Why is it assumed that learning to cooking animals is a necessary hurdle?

When we’re capable of eating animals raw. And bugs and worms etc.

Whereas in order to consume a wider variety of plants, cooking and other more complex perpetrations are absolutely necessary.

If you're quite finished parroting RFK Jr pro-parasitic brain worm talking points not even aboriginal Australians ate their fish and meat raw.

* https://warndu.com/blogs/blog/traditional-aboriginal-food

And we know that because Australian Aborigines have a written history dating back 90,000 (or whatever the number is this week) years.

Midden piles.

Which part of my first comment isn’t factually correct?

The implication that because humans are "capable of eating animals raw" they therefore must do a lot of that (isolated idiots aside).

Actually yeah Australian aborigines have a famously rigorous oral history.

Have to consider meat digestion from a net calorie perspective. Eating raw meat is possible sure. But once you get to dense protein meats like a red meat, your body expends a lot of calories in the act of digesting it raw. Cooking it is like a pre-digestion step and allows your body to digest it with less energy expenditure.

It also probably was helpful for other reasons. You could store cooked meat easier/longer without refrigeration or kill off some of the bacteria and such making it healthier.

Much like today, early humans were indeed capable of eating meat raw.

Also much like today, early humans did not do so if there was a way to cook it.

My interpretation was similar. The carb-sugar diet was never a highlight because it was a given. The article talks about primates that have high carb-sugar diets but doesn't explain why their brains remain so small compared to humans. Maybe they will eventually evolve? Maybe cooked meat / dense protein is the X factor? If so, that takes back to the beginning and highlights protein. It seems reasonable the combination of the two would be important. Protein enables muscle development, human evolution made us exceptionally well-suited for long-distance and endurance travel compared to all other living primates. This further improves are ability to forage and is just an evolutionary winning combination.

My curiosity leads me more towards, are their other primates that had similar / convergent evolution that independently discovered dense protein sources? Is homo sapien really just a path of singular linear "march of progress" evolution? Were there other marches of progress from other primates or any other species that we competed against or merged with? Those kind of questions become more interesting once you realize the diet combination that creates big brains

>about primates that have high carb-sugar diets but doesn't explain why their brains remain so small compared to humans. Maybe they will eventually evolve?

if they have abundant sources of carb-sugar, there would be no selection pressure to evolve in a particular direction.

Don't most evolutionary traits/changes come at times of restrictions? I don't think many traits are developed during times of abundance, it's when there is a shortage and they have to seek out something else; like protein. Or, sometimes it's just natural competition for the share of the abundance. If there where a big brain out competing you for your carbs, you might have to reconsider your dietary options and make substitutes/changes that would have evolutionary implications.

Interesting, but I've read for a long time, that our humanoid predecessors at some point figured out how to get to bone marrow with tools. That provided the energy dense food as well an evolutionary impetus to develop larger brains to build better tools and handle them better. Fire and the capability to cook were developed much later.

I don’t know how true that is. But I read a theory somewhere that people developed bigger brains when they started eating more fish which contains omega 3s.

If you’re constantly moving sugar is a necessity for maintaining glycogen. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any food type, it’s all about context.

Kind of; humans do adapt remarkably well to low-glucose diets, and we can produce glycogen without sugary inputs via gluconeogenesis. They do make it much easier, though.

Well you need some substrate which can be metabolized into sugar, such as carbohydrate or protein.

Definitely. I was only responding to the statement that sugar is a necessity for energy if you’re moving around a lot. You can do this without sugar.

That’s false. Carbs are not a requirement for human body. Proof of that are native populations living far north, exclusively off of animal food sources.

Human body prefers ketones as a source of energy. But glycogen is faster.

My simplified mental model is like this. Ketones are normal gasoline. And glycogen is racing fuel (ethanol). If you run a stock car on racing fuel it may start and drive for a while but it’s damaging the engine and creates unnecessary wear.

“Ketones are normal gasoline” is a very fringe view.

Ketone supplements have been available for a while, and nobody was able to show any benefit of using them. 100% snake oil.

If on the other hand you want to produce ketones endogenously, you basically have to put your body in a state of starvation. It’s not really gasoline then, more like burning the passenger seats as fuel so you can arrive at the destination.

I’m not advocating ketone supplements. Your body produces ketones by itself.

The carnivore diet mentality is strong here.

Also not really supported by anthropology or science.

The only folks who think like this are folks who choose to believe weird dietary theories to support a pre chosen stance, like the carnivore diet or some form of excess(in the form of self-care/diet)

I’m not advocating a carnivore diet nor eat like that. Had croissants today! But it’s true that people of the north do not eat carbs as they simply do not exist there.

The link doesn't work (it only serves a redirect to hearsnetworks.com/) if you are outside the united states

Today we know sugar was a key ingredient for brain development in humans, not just proteins because of eating meat.

How do we know that? Any sources?

Several are mentioned in the article, eg:

  While meat was definitely a caloric bonanza for early humans, recent primate studies offer evidence that sugary fruits continued to be a critical “brain food.” A 2017 paper looked at 140 primate species and compared their brain sizes with their diets. 

  “What [that study] showed very clearly was that the fruit-eaters, the frugivores, had 25 percent bigger brains, on average, than the folivores, the leaf-eaters,” Brand-Miller says. The fruit-eaters also had bigger brains than the omnivores, which ate meat.

which is one thread of the argument laid out in:

A central role for dietary sugars in human evolution - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aed8437

the paper centrally discussed.

Funny how science deniers will downvote anything that doesn’t fit their world view

Humans have always eaten carbs; it’s the body’s preferred energy source. But human bodies can get energy from three sources, in order of preference—carbs, fat, and muscle (when all else fails).

Our bodies evolved to store fat for this very reason—future energy needs. Ancient humans lived feast or famine, and our biology adapted. We’re built to fast for days, using body fat for energy. When carbs are available, they’re preferred because they are faster and easier to burn.

Sugar is carbs. But ancient fruit in no way resembles today’s cultivated monstrosities, in appearance or sugar content.

Our modern problem is—we gorge on carbs all day long. So our body helpfully stores the excess as body fat for future use—because it expects eventual ‘famine’ where we’ll be fasting with few carbs available and need it. But we never let our body get to burn that fat.

To nitpick: at rest, muscle cells use fat over carbs to produce ATP. It is only during effort that the cells start to use more carbs than fat. The rest of the post is, to my understanding, correct.

When exogenous carbs are available, they are used preferentially, also at rest. Carbs need to go somewhere, and they only end up in fat storage after all other options are exhausted.

As intensity increases during exercise, the body starts releasing muscle glycogen. If previously the muscles were mostly using fat (because no exogenous carbs were available), now that endogenous carbs are ready, the muscles will use them instead. You cannot, however, reduce muscle glycogen use by supplementing extra carbs.

Body’s preferred food source is ketones. It functions most optimally when using ketones.

But the fastest accessible energy source is glycogen, which comes from carbs.

Their carbs were natural, and they walked all day. It has no relation to consuming foods and drinks with added sugar, especially while relatively sedentary.

The body makes no distinction between "natural" and "artificial" anything. It's just chemistry. Likewise, eating berries or honey is absolutely related to drinking (e.g.) sugary drinks.

You are personally making the distinction. If your body could do that, dieting would be A LOT easier!

You are speaking nonsense, since natural carbs, with the exception of honey and coconut juice, are embedded with fiber. Artificial carbs predominantly lack the natural fiber matrix, which leads to inflammatory microbiota and systemic inflammation. Berries on the other hand are anti-inflammatory.

I'm speaking biochemistry, not nonsense, and you are conflating carbohydrates with "foods containing carbohydrates" (which is: all food).

What a coincidence, so do I

Does this mean you are a human??

Sugar is life. Saccharides FTW!!! vrooooooooooooooooomm

Who knew the human body is multi-fuel.

anyone who reads Gary Taubes

It’s interesting. Human baby is in ketosis when born, breast feeding maintains it. There is no essential carb.. Switching to ketogenic diet is cure for many health issues.

Then again, I know fruitarian who runs ultramarathons. He eats only sugar, so clearly human body can run on two different fuels very well.

Maybe we shouldn’t mix them but choose just the other? Carbs or fat. It would make sense that if there are two paths to get energy from eating, the system may not run optimally if you keep feeding both at the same time?

Humans seem to do alright with most diets except for the eat too much one

Why would that make sense? People are always coming up with diets that look something like “stop eating bananas because they have been secretly making you sick and only eat blueberries which cleanse all your toxins” (and whatever variants thereof). It makes sense in a “doctors hate this one simple trick” sense but not biologically.

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