In response to Sarah mason's piece on Friday:
I believe Sarah makes a justifiable point. She is also not the first
archaeologist to raise this objection. Just days before her note to the
list, another archaeologist made a similar point to me in private email.
In contemplating their messages I suspect that most archaeologists probably
have very similar concerns and may well be wondering if the rest of us are
all daft.
From the point of view of an archaeologist, much if not most of our
discussions are putting the cart before the horse. They understand better
than anybody the available evidence for what pre-agricultural humans ate
really is, how slim it is on certain points, how much debate there has been
in this area, and where and how those debates continue. It is in those
debates that they center their attention. From the view of the
archaeologist, the object of "paleolithic nutrition" is to find out very
specifically what exactly people ate during a very specific and exact time
period; to them the discussion is about that specific point. The idea of
applying this to modern life probably seems a bit odd. From their
perspective a lot of the deductions made about human diet prior to written
history are only speculation and often not particularly scientific by the
standards of their field.
What I think some archaeologists may be missing is that they'll probably
never have a complete picture and will always have debate over many
specific points. They may also miss that the results of their hunt in this
area has serious ramifications for those far beyond their field. The
question of what humans evolved to eat is an important one which may have
tremendous impact on medicine and nutrition.
In fact, the concept of paleolithic nutrition as a model for a healthy diet
for modern humans started among anthropologists (Vilhjalmur Stefansson
seems to have been the first), with people in medicine and nutrition taking
a strong interest some time later. That interest waxed and waned for a
while but got serious I think after Boyd Eaton revived serious interest in
the subject in the 1980s.
The very name "paleolithic nutrition" probably suggests something far
different and far more specific to an archaeologist than it does to people
outside that field. To the nutritionist, "Paleolithic nutrition" is about
how humans ate prior to agriculture; to the archaeologist, it implies
examinatioon of precisely that particular period in prehistory from about
750,000 b.c. to roughly 15,000 b.c. and furthermore would be about various
periods within the paleolithic, and various regions during those time
periods.
I suspect that a lot of archaeologists are simply lost on a lot of these
discussions because they're not entirely sure what some of us are babbling
about, and are probably wondering quite frequently why many of us are
generalizing strongly about certain things that, to them, ought not to be
generalized about at all.
Sarah suggests that:
>First, since much of the data used in constructing
>arguments about a 'healthy' diet derives from studies of recent h-gs and
>traditional agriculturalists, why is it felt necessary to go through the
>extra step of extrapolating such diets back to the Palaeolithic to
>demonstrate that they might be good for us too? Notwithstanding arguments
>about our common ancient genetic heritage, this seems to me an unnecessary
>step, replete as it is with the many uncertainties that much of the debate
>on this list makes clear exist - if elements of dietary practice exhibited
>by recent h-gs and agriculturalists can be demonstrated to be 'healthy',
>then any need to back this up by referring to them as 'Palaeolithic' is not
>only superfluous, but may well be inaccurate. Which leads onto my second
>point, which is that the desire to produce a model of Palaeolithic diet
>which supports recommendations for a modern healthy diet is in many ways
>putting the cart before the horse, in that arguments about the 'paleodiet'
>may be being influenced by opinions about what constitutes a 'healthy'
>diet; and, most importantly (from my point of view anyway), may be
>preventing an objective approach to the true nature of Palaeolithic diets.
The very concept of paleolithic diet (or exercise) as a healthy modern
lifestyle is a theoretical model, not a proven proposition. And it is much
more a medical or biological model than an archaeological one. Although it
may be of some interest to the archaeologist, I don't think the
archaeologist should take it very seriously in his quest to learn -in his
field-. The biological model may be an interesting thing for him to
contemplate and might provide him with a flash of insight, but might
equally be a distraction or lead him in directions he needn't necessarily
go.
But without the evidence from the evolutionary record, the medical side of
this discussion grinds to a halt. Who would seriously suggest that the
diet of the Pygmie, the Australian Aborigine, the Watusi, and the Inuit
have something in common, or anything meaningful to contribute to modern
ideas of nutrition? What compelling basis would there be for any such
theory? The only basis, realistically, seems to lie in the fact that most
of the evidence suggests that modern hunter/gatherers have a lifestyle that
probably more closely resembles that of pre-historic humans than anything
or anyone else in the modern world (although Lindeberg's work with the
Kitava provides an interesting, if closely related, alternative view). The
only reason we would think their lifestyle would have much to teach us in
the field of nutrition is because they appear to be the peoples closest to
the evolutionary roots we sprang from.
Medical research is full of conflicting theories and ideas. Nutritional
research as a field is chaotic and filled with a shameful amount of
politics; large corporate agricultural interests fund research testing the
alleged health benefits of vegetarianism or whole grain foods, ethical
vegetarians fund studies to test the proposition that meat is carcinogenic
and atherogenic, margarine manufacturers fund studies attempting to show
that butter kills and vegetable oil is "heart-healthy," egg manufacturers
fund studies showing that eggs are good for you, and so on and so forth.
And because human biology is such a very complicated thing, it is terribly
easy to come up with facts that support a wide variety of theories.
Furthermore, the pace of much medical research is achingly slow and
terribly specific to the point at times of being not very useful without
much more research. The simple question of whether or not saturated fat is
atherogenic has been fought over for decades, and just when the issue
seemed settled has started again in recent years with people on both sides
growing quite vociferous. In general medical research in areas like this
one moves in terribly tiny increments.
Furthermore, a tremendous amount of research in nutrition, ever since the
earlier parts of this century (starting with Kellogg, I think) has been
driven by people who advocate vegetarianism or near-vegetarianism as the
"natural" human diet. In fact it's surprising how often you'll hear
well-educated people in the field of nutrition or medicine claim that human
beings evolved as herbivores! Such claims are -astonishingly- common--not
in the published literature per se, but in medical schools, schools of
nutrition, and popular books on nutrition written by people who really
ought to know better. Nutritional research itself doesn't suggest this
openly, but a great deal of research in this area is driven, consciously or
unconsciously, by these kinds of assumptions. Paleontology and archaeology
ought to be helping us answer these questions, and a great many others.
Let me use another example: Start as a medical researcher with the
proposition that humans did not evolve to eat large amounts of cereal
grains on daily basis. Examine the archaeological evidence for this. Find
that there is some support for this common-sense theory, and not much to
refute it. Now from the perspective of an archaeologist perhaps you
haven't gotten anything, but to the medical researcher you've opened up a
vast new field of inquiry. You can test this idea further and see if you
can't find a link between certain medical problems and widespread grain
consumption. If you can then find a correlation (and some have done so),
you can try direct lab research to see if you can figure out what about the
grains might be troublesome, if anything.
This chain of events can't happen without having that theoretical model in
the first place. If indeed there IS something in cereal grains that causes
many modern diseases, you might spend years, even centuries, before you
stumble upon that link if you didn't have that theoretical model to base
your explorations on. Who otherwise would look to the harmless and
wholesome bread everyone so enjoys as a possible cause of rheumatoid
arthritis, multiple sclerosis, or cancer? Yet there are researchers
seriously looking at such questions now--some of them are on this list.
For example, there is at least one researcher on this list who is looking
at a "paleolithic diet" model of nutrition as a possible treatment for
multiple sclerosis.
The discomfort of the archaeologist in these discussions is both
understandable and serious, but also may be missing an important point. If
archaeology can provide useful insights to people in other fields, then
that is a tremendous contribution. To be more melodramatic, if
archaeological data can provide inspiration and insight into theories in
medicine which eventually lead to improving the quality of life for
millions of people, even saving lives, that's impressive indeed. It's
probably not why you got into archaeology, in fact that was probably the
furthest thing from your mind at the time, but it represents (to me) one of
the most exciting ways in which one field can cross-pollinate with another
to bring about wonderful results.
To me it seems that the goal for the archaeologist, when discussing the
medical model of "paleolithic nutrition," would be to either ignore it
completely as a distraction (which may well be the best course of action),
or to attempt to test that model, disproving its assumptions if possible or
adding supporting data if not.
This does leave me in a difficult position with this list. It seems that
the archaeologists may have a completely different agenda for what they
want to talk about than the biologists and physicians. My hope has been
that the archaeologists among us (and we have at least a dozen among our
membership, most of whom have remained silent so far!) would be able to
provide data which either supports or contradicts the medical model--or to
give simple insights to various points of contention such as, "Well yes
there is some support for that, and here's why," or "No I don't think you
can find support for that, and here's way." I had also hoped that
archaeologists would be able to glean some ideas and insights from other
fields, and perhaps share data with each other, but perhaps that's not
possible?
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