Keto Info Week 12/1

[spEEdfrEEk]

CATEGORY: diets/paleo

TECHNICAL: **

SUMMARY:

This is an interesting little document that I found quite a long

time ago. It attempts to shatter the myth that neolithic humans (in

Europe) were primarily plant eaters. This is significant when one

considers the arguments made by vegans/vegetarians that human beings

are, and have always been, primarily herbivores.

Many on this list know that I staunchly believe that humans

consumed a majority of animal based food and not vegetable foods. This

does not mean I advocate a meat-only diet. It does, however, mean that

I encourage the consumption of mostly fiberous veggies (and herbs, etc.),

and getting a majority of calories from protein and fat sources.

If this research proves to be correct, then it indicates

something that is pretty important from an evolutionary point of view.

Namely, that humans (of european origin/background) may not have had as

much time to adapt to a grain based diet as expected. The previous

estimate was about 20,000 years. This document argues otherwise (4,000 -

2,000 years).

Should that be the case, then it's very unlikely we've had time

to adjust to such a quick change in diet (from animal to grain). And,

that adds fuel to the argument that grains are contributing

significantly to the increase in diseases of degeneration so prominent

today...

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British Archaeology, no 12, March 1996: Features

_________________________________________________________________

Bone analysis suggests Neolithic people preferred meat, writes Mike

Richards. `First farmers' with no taste for grain

The Neolithic period is traditionally associated with the beginning

of farming, yet in Britain - by contrast with much of the rest of Europe -

the evidence has always been thin on the ground. Where are the first

farmers' settlements? Where are the fields?

The almost complete absence of this kind of evidence has led some

archaeologists, over recent years, to question the view that people in

Britain actually grew most of their food in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC.

Now, a scientific study of Neolithic human bone seems to point in the same

revisionist direction.

The small-scale study - the first of its kind - of the bones of about

23 Neolithic people from ten sites in central and southern England,

suggests that these `first farmers' relied heavily on animal meat for

food, or on animal by-products such as milk and cheese, and that plant

foods in fact formed little importance in their diet. The bones date from

throughout the Neolithic, c 4100BC - c 2000BC.

The study was based on the idea that our bodies are made up of

organic and inorganic components derived from the foods we have eaten.

There are a number of ways of tracing the original food source of some of

our tissues, and one way is to look at the relative ratios of certain

elements, known as `stable isotopes', in bone protein.

These stable isotopes can tell us a number of things about what a

person's diet has been for most of their life. One particular isotope can

tell us whether humans were getting most of their food from plant or

animal sources. Generally speaking, this is done by comparing human

isotope values to animal isotope values. If the human values are more like

that of a herbivore (eg, horses or cattle) they are eating a great deal of

plant food, and if they are more like carnivores (eg, wolves or foxes),

they are eating more meat.

A number of human bones from the Iron Age and from Romano-British

sites were also tested, and their isotope values were a little higher than

those of herbivores. This is as we might expect, as there is little doubt

that in these periods people practised relatively intense cereal

agriculture, and only supplemented their diet with meat. The Neolithic

results, however, were surprisingly different. They were as high, and

sometimes even higher, than stable isotope values of carnivores. This

suggests the Neolithic people had relatively little plant food in their

diet and instead were consuming large amounts of meat. It could also mean

they were eating a lot of animal by-products, like milk and cheese, as

these are indistinguishable from meat itself using stable isotopes.

So what, then, was the Neolithic economy based on? Animal remains

from Neolithic sites are generally of domestic species (eg, cattle and

pig) rather than wild, and cattle from Neolithic sites such as Hambledon

Hill in Dorset are actually larger than the cattle typically found in the

Iron Age. This evidence may suggest an animal-dependent economy - indeed,

one in which animals were well treated and kept for a long time - and, as

the Neolithic specialist Andrew Sherratt has suggested, the British

Neolithic may have been characterised by a `secondary products

revolution', with animal husbandry and an emphasis on animal milk and

cheese, instead of by an `agricultural revolution' and the growing of

crops.

Grain and agricultural implements have, of course, been found at

Neolithic sites in Britain. The isotope results do not rule out some

limited grain production and consumption; but they suggest it did not form

a significant portion of the diet. The sites where grain has been found

generally seem to have been used mainly for ritual purposes, and it is

possible (as archaeologists such as Richard Bradley and Julian Thomas have

argued) that in Britain, on the edge of Europe, grain was grown, or even

imported from the continent, only for ritual purposes. Agricultural

implements may also have assumed a largely ritual significance.

There are, however, potential difficulties with stable isotope

analysis. The main concern is whether the animal stable isotope data used

as a benchmark are accurate for the specific British Neolithic sites

tested. In the study, we took `average animal values' from a large

database, held at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, covering all

Europe over the past 10,000 years. It may be that there are regional

variations in plant and animal isotope values of which we are, as yet,

unaware. Research, however, continues - and if our preliminary results are

confirmed, we may be able to scrap the notion of Neolithic

agriculturalists in Britain once and for all.

Mike Richards is a PhD student at the Research Laboratory for Archaeology

in Oxford

:cool: TJ :cool: