{"id":108102,"date":"2009-12-28T11:33:54","date_gmt":"2009-12-28T16:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marksdailyapple.com\/?p=9865"},"modified":"2009-12-28T11:33:54","modified_gmt":"2009-12-28T16:33:54","slug":"dear-mark-did-grok-eat-grains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/108102","title":{"rendered":"Dear Mark: Did Grok Eat Grains?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sorghumThe Primal Blueprint<\/a>, as our good readers know, is founded on the principle of evolutionary biology. This certainly applies to our view of what\u2019s appropriate or not in terms of nutrition.\u00a0 In short, what our long time ancestors ate during the course of 2 million+ years, we\u2019re still designed to eat. Even the last 200,000 years of hunting and gathering, from a physiological standpoint, trumps the comparatively short 10,000 or so years since the Agricultural Revolution, when humans commenced widespread farming practices and prepared grains as a significant part of their diet.<\/p>\n

An article<\/a> published in this month\u2019s Science Magazine presents archeological evidence that, according to its author, challenges this accepted timeline. A number of readers have written me about this story. Here\u2019s one letter among the bunch\u2026.<\/p>\n

Mark, <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Please help me make some sense to this: Stone Age diet included processed grains<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I’m a crossfitter in Colorado and most of the gym keeps a Grok diet and are confused about this article. Does this open the door to other minimally processed grains?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Let me give you the gist. Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary examined a variety of tools (scrapers, grinders, points, flakes, and drills) he and others retrieved from an excavation site in Northwest Mozambique. Based on dating of surrounding sediment layers, Mercader estimated the age of the oldest tools to be approximately 100,000 years old. Some 80% of the tools he found tested positive for sorghum starch residue, which \u2013 he says \u2013 suggests that sorghum was used as a food source at the time. Other residues found on the tools included African wine palm, African potato, the false banana, pigeon peas, and wild oranges.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s suppose that Mercader\u2019s dating estimates are correct. Let\u2019s also suppose that the tools Mercader tested had indeed been used to prepare food, as the presence of other food residues suggest. First off, it doesn\u2019t necessarily follow that the sorghum was also used as food. Tools, for prehistoric humans (if not for moderns as well) needed to serve multiple purposes, supporting not just food preparation but shelter construction and other daily living tasks. As one archeologist skeptic, Curtis Marean of Arizona State University in Tempe, explains<\/a>, grasses were regular parts of \u201cbedding\u201d and \u201ckindling.\u201d Another critic, Huw Barton from the University of Leicester, questions<\/a> Mercader\u2019s assumption that the sorghum had been used for food based on the curious presence of the residue on tools not associated with food preparation, including drills.<\/p>\n

However, the biggest stumbling block on the way to Mercader\u2019s theory is sheer inefficiency. Just because evidence exists that they could, doesn\u2019t mean that they did \u2013 with any regularity, if at all. I\u2019m with critics of the findings like Marean and Loren Cordain<\/a>, who argue that the full sequence of finding, collecting, transporting, processing and baking any kind of grain wouldn\u2019t have been worth the effort for the nominal nutritional benefit gained<\/strong>. Make no mistake, the use of grains for food isn\u2019t as simple as pulling and popping the seeds in your mouth. Even if you attempt to harvest the seeds by hand, a \u201ctedious\u201d process as Cordain notes, you\u2019re still looking at a fairly lengthy processing. Raw, fully intact grains are indigestible for humans. The necessary preparation process involves \u2013 minimally \u2013 roasting (a relatively inadequate option) or fine grinding and baking (a better but more intensive method). Nothing from the excavation site shows any seed gathering tools like \u201canimal skin containers\u201d or baskets\/pottery (too early for this time), as Cordain explains. Furthermore, there is nothing present at the site to confirm any kind of cooking preparation. As provocative as it is, it\u2019s scientifically too big of a leap to make with any certitude.<\/p>\n

Finally, even if the people of the Ngalue region did actually eat the sorghum as Mercader believes, there\u2019s a big difference between suggesting grains were a significant and regular source of our ancestors\u2019 diet 100,000 years ago and saying they were merely occasional \u2013 and probably desperation-induced \u2013 fruits of foraging labors<\/strong>. In times of scarcity, pre-Agricultural humans probably resorted to less nutritionally efficient means of \u201cgathering.\u201d It\u2019s called the survival instinct, and it\u2019s of little surprise that they might have been moved to a certain degree of ingenuity when their life depended on it. However, when the group was able to relocate or when traditional foods were in good supply again, logic dictates that they would have returned to their staple diets. The evidence supporting the use of the sorghum for food is relatively scant and virtually nonexistent when it comes to the gathering, processing and preparation of any significant supply. While Mercader\u2019s research promps speculation to what an isolated group of early humans could have attempted on a small and likely very temporary scale, it doesn\u2019t in any way rewrite the historical timeline on agricultural development \u2013 or evolutionary nutrition.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You know where I stand on Mercader\u2019s study. I\u2019m interested to hear what you all have to say about it. Shoot me your thoughts, and thanks as always for your great questions and comments. Keep \u2018em coming!<\/p>\n

Get Free Health Tips, Recipes and Workouts<\/a> Delivered to Your Inbox<\/em><\/h4>\n

Related posts:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Dear Mark: Visting Family – Primal Compromises and Grain Alternatives<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. Why Grains Are Unhealthy<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. Dear Mark: Don’t Call it a “Diet”<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

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    The Primal Blueprint, as our good readers know, is founded on the principle of evolutionary biology. This certainly applies to our view of what\u2019s appropriate or not in terms of nutrition.\u00a0 In short, what our long time ancestors ate during the course of 2 million+ years, we\u2019re still designed to eat. Even the last 200,000 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}