Food for Thought - Dietary change was a driving force in human evolutiongreenspun.com : LUSENET : Current News - Homefront Preparations : One Thread |
By William R. LeonardSALAD DAYS Image: JOHN GURCHE
We walk on two legs, carry around enormous brains and have colonized every corner of the globe. Anthropologists and biologists have long sought to understand how our lineage came to differ so profoundly from the primate norm in these ways, and over the years all manner of hypotheses aimed at explaining each of these oddities have been put forth. But a growing body of evidence indicates that these miscellaneous quirks of humanity in fact have a common thread: they are largely the result of natural selection acting to maximize dietary quality and foraging efficiency. Changes in food availability over time, it seems, strongly influenced our hominid ancestors. Thus, in an evolutionary sense, we are very much what we ate.
It's a long article and the rest is here,
-- Anonymous, November 22, 2002