Nutritional Changes in Human History
Although we now think of an optimal diet as one that promotes longevity (long life), historically our optimal diet was whatever made us strong enough to have healthy children and then live long enough to help those children survive to do the same. The best measure of good nutrition is average height, which is about 80 percent genetic but is also strongly linked to childhood and adolescent calories and especially protein intake. Although big and strong people might out-hunt, out-gather, and even out-fight their smaller neighbors, they also need more calories. So people faced with chronic or recurrent food shortages are better off if they are short and lean. The small bodies of less-well-nourished humans are not only an effect of their lower intake of calories, protein, and calcium but also protection against the likelihood of even lower intakes in the future. By these metrics, our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors were remarkably well nourished. Remains from the Paleolithic Stone Age (2.6 mya to 10,000 ya) show that men had an average height of about 179 cm (5 feet 10% inches) and an estimated weight of about 67 kg (148 pounds). The women were substantially smaller, averaging an estimated 157.5 cm (5 feet 2 inches) and 54 kg (119 pounds). After agriculture began, about 10,000 years ago, in the Neolithic era, humans actually got smaller. Archaeological evidence suggests that the average Neolithic man was about 165 cm (5 feet 5 inches) tall and weighed 63 kg (139 pounds), while women were an average of 150 cm (4 feet 11 inches) and weighed 45 kg (99 pounds).
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