Seriously, I do like vegans, however I couldn’t eat a whole one.
When former TV host Pete Evans was fined $25,000 by Australia’s medical watchdog for selling that gross attack on the health of the vulnerable and gullible – a bells-and-whistles blender-looking thing designed to beat COVID – I hope his sunk credibility dragged down with it his paleo-diet manifesto.
He’s not only using up our oxygen, but owes me $10.
And speaking of non-evolved beings, did you know the 250-million-year-old Reptiliomorpha is thought to have the first-known claws?
(We will get back to food by column’s end.)
Also, the finishing times for 18-year-old marathon runners is similar to that of 60-year-olds.
These two factors can lead to evolutionary questions about our dietary health.
Let us now draw a long bow ala Kubrick’s split-second jump from airborne prehistoric weapon to space ship from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
A seminal cinematic moment, that one, and thankfully early on in the film so you can give up straight after, because it’s pretty boring from then on.
Bear with me.
When our ancestors’ claws dropped one of their layers and were converted from lignin to keratin, we developed nails which still let us pull flesh apart (not cooked because both fire and solar ovens were some way off) and allowed for buying early scratch-its.
Our nails then Kubrick-jumped to cutlery; and can you see the link between sitting around a dining table and around a killed carcass?
Interestingly, we required more meat to function our newly evolved larger brain about 200,000 years ago, so an argument held by long-distance runner Christopher McDougall (confessing he is not a scientist) is that humans evolved as pack animals to outrun prey.
There’s credibility to this theory with his evidence from the University of Utah: an 18-year-old beginning a running career may well peak at about age 27 but can take up to 45 years to slowly recede back to their 18-year-old fitness. Ergo, our entire age-range can run.
We have evolved physically as runners — just cop those legs and lungs of ours compared to our tree-climbing and arse-sitting relatives.
We sweat better than any mammal and can run the longest in one journey and therefore can outrun an antelope when we target one as a pack.
The Tarahumara people of the Chihuahua copper canyons in Mexico have a culture which some say is well preserved from pre-history.
They not only run up to 200 miles in one go, but they are also known for both preying and praying by way of running.
It takes a lot of prayer for me to even find my runners.
Of note, the Tarahumara have also maintained a possible pre-history diet that covers practically every food group, including tobacco (which we’ll let slide for now).
And when you consider that corn, tomato, chillies, sweet potato, squash and beans evolved in the more central and southern Americas, it is the kind of ancient diet that does warrant a modern-day following and perhaps Pete Evans-styled commercialisation.
With running shoes included.
Until Pete and I make up (I’ll waive the 10 bucks) and I get him on to this more wholesome gimmick, then a well-balanced diet is highly recommended, even though the specifics of such a thing are getting refined as the science on it tightens.
McDougall, to his credit, acknowledged that with pre-history, “say whatever the hell you want and get away with it”.
Martin Luther King Jr said: “We are not makers of history. We are made by history”.
Carl Sagan had: “You have to know the past to understand the present”.
Wilson: “I make none of this up”.
Evans: “I don’t owe him 10 dollars”.
