Laura Weyrich, the lead on this study is quoted as follows:
She says the difference in diets reflects the fact that the two groups lived in two very different environments.We are told by supposedly respectable historians that want to write a grand narrative for the human race that the human body has evolved handle a particular diet. The very fact that humans adapted to environments from the frigid north where little green grows, to the equatorial regions, or at least environments as varied as ancient Belgian grasslands and dense Spanish forests indicates that humans were not evolved to handle any particular diet. (Don't quibble that this study is about Neanderthals, not homo sapiens sapiens; our non-Neanderthal ancestors were more successful than the Neanderthal line, and so likely were even more adaptable than the Neanderthals.)
Northern Europe, including Belgium, had wide open spaces with grasslands and many mammals. "It would have been very grassy, and kind of mountainous," says Weyrich. "You can imagine a big woolly rhino wandering through the grass there." Perhaps tracked by hungry Neanderthals looking for dinner.
But farther south in Spain, the Neanderthals lived in dense forests. "It's hard to imagine a big woolly rhino trying to wedge themselves between the trees," says Weyrich. And so, she says the Neanderthals there feasted on all kinds of plants and mushrooms. "They're very opportunistic, trying to find anything that's edible in their environment."
What is amazing is that people with a supposedly scientific temper swallow this historian nonsense with little to no skepticism. Since I don't think we evolved to credulously believe historians, I'm not sure what is the basis for this lack of skepticism.
guest · 416 weeks ago
macgupta 81p · 416 weeks ago
guest · 416 weeks ago
And what do you have against generalization, it's the soul of science? Are you against it everywhere, or just in history.
macgupta 81p · 416 weeks ago
guest · 416 weeks ago
I don't know if you have actually read Harari (and I'm guessing not, based on your argument) but he just says that a very narrow diet, for example almost all wheat or almost exclusively rice, is unhealthy compared to a varied one. Many peasants throughout history, including today, have eaten such diets, and the skeletal remains as well as modern medicine demonstrate that the results are unhealthy.
Those Spanish Neandertal probably ate hundreds or even thousands of different kinds of mushrooms, roots, berries, and nuts as well as insects and the occasional squirrel or rabbit. They also evidently knew to gnaw a certain kind of tree bark for pain relief.
Harari's real point, though, is not that agriculture was a wrong turn, his point is that it was far from an unmixed blessing. I think we can say the same about a lot of history's trends.
macgupta 81p · 416 weeks ago
It is perhaps only a few thousand years after the invention of agriculture that population densities increased to the point where gathering was no longer sustainable, and the diet necessarily lost its variety. The population likely increased precisely because agriculture + gathering + animal herding was so much more efficient. It is this subsequent population that likely displays the effects that Harari, etc., point out - that is my guess. To attribute to the invention of agriculture effects that showed up considerably later than its invention is IMO not quite honest.
I'm mostly guessing in the above; presumably if the research literature was readily available, I could decide my guesses easily.
macgupta 81p · 416 weeks ago
Sorry, this sounds similar to apologia for Trump.
macgupta 81p · 416 weeks ago
Moreover, they probably did abandon pure hunting gathering precisely because life became more pleasant. That a couple of thousand years later it would not be so pleasant is a different matter.
macgupta 81p · 416 weeks ago
"Yet in Northern Europe over the past twelve hundred years human stature has followed a U-shaped curve: from a high around 800 A.D., to a low sometime in the seventeenth century, and back up again. " (per http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/04/05/the-...
guest · 416 weeks ago
One more brief excerpt:
"The more people clustered together, the more pest-ridden and poorly fed they became. "
macgupta 81p · 416 weeks ago
The major samples from Herculaneum and Pompeii reveal the stature of the ancient adult body. The average height for females was calculated from the data to have been 155 cm in Herculaneum and 154 cm in Pompeii: that for males was 169 cm in Herculaneum and 166 cm in Pompeii. This is somewhat higher than the average height of modern Neapolitans in the 1960s and about 10 cm shorter than the WHO recommendations for modern world populations.
- Laurence, Ray. "Health and the Life Course at Herculaneum and Pompeii." Health in Antiquity. Ed. Helen King. London: Routledge, 2005.
guest · 416 weeks ago
In many ways, the mixed lifestyle offers some of the best diets. But in most places it doesn't seem to be stable.
macgupta 81p · 416 weeks ago