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By Root 288 0

—known as the “Agricultural Revolution”—happened, and yet we have almost completely lost track of the foods our ancient ancestors ate. The so-called new foods that agriculture gave us so completely displaced the old foods that most of us are unaware that these foods were ever new. Many people assume that cereals, dairy products, salted foods, legumes, domesticated meats, and refined sugars have always been part of our diet. Not true! We need to rediscover the foods that brought our Paleolithic ancestors vibrant health, lean bodies, and freedom from chronic disease. The foods that agreed nicely with their genetic blueprints are the same foods that agree nicely with our genetic blueprints.

But what are these foods? How can we possibly know what our Paleolithic ancestors ate? My research team and I have been asking these same questions for the past decade. I am happy to tell you that we have found answers to these questions by carefully piecing together information from four sources:

• The fossil record

• Contemporary hunter-gatherer diets

• Chimpanzee diets

• Nutrients in wild animals and plants

The Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) era began some 2.5 million years ago in Africa when the first crude stone tools were developed. It ended about 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, with the first ancient farms. (Perhaps twenty different species of ancient humans lived in the Paleolithic era. However, for the purposes of this book, we’ll cover only the diets of our direct ancestors.) We can trace the evidence showing the dominance of lean meat in human diets from our origins 2.5 million years ago until the beginnings of agriculture 10,000 years ago.

Lean Meat Is Brain Food

The notion that human beings were meant to be vegetarians runs contrary to every shred of evolutionary evidence from the fossil and anthropological record. We owe a huge debt to lean meat. In fact, scientific evidence overwhelmingly suggests that if our ancient ancestors had eaten a meatless diet, we wouldn’t be where we are today. I wouldn’t have become a scientist, you wouldn’t be reading this book, and we would all look a lot more like our nearest animal relative—the chimpanzee.

How can this be? Chimps are hairy, and they have a big gut. They swing from trees. Well, yes, but about 5 to 7 million years ago, so did our prehuman ancestors. The evidence is that the family tree forks—and humans moved into a category all their own. But genetically speaking, we are only about 1.7 percent different from the chimp.

Chimps are mostly vegetarians (although they do eat a few insects, bird eggs, and the occasional small animal), and they have the big, protruding belly characteristic of vegetarian animals (horses and cows, for example, have big bellies, too). Apes need large, active guts to extract the nutrients from their fiber-filled, plant-based diet.

About 2.5 million years ago, our ancestors began trading in their big guts for bigger brains—to the point where today our bellies are about 40 percent smaller than those of chimps and our brains are about three times larger. The turning point came when our ancestors figured out that eating animal food (meat and organs) gave them much more energy. Over the years, their bellies began to shrink—because they didn’t need the extra room to process all that roughage. All the energy formerly needed by the gut was diverted to the brain, which doubled and then tripled in size. Without nutrient-dense animal foods in the diet, the large brains that make us human never would have had the chance to develop. Meat and animal foods literally shaped our genome.

Interestingly, just before the same period when human brains began to expand, something new came on the scene: tools—crude stone weapons, and knives that our ancestors used to butcher animal carcasses and later to hunt. We know this because of telltale cut marks that have been found on the bones of fossilized animals and from evidence (a classic example is the 125,000-year-old spear crafted from a yew tree found embedded between the ribs of an extinct straight-tusked