this week, new fossil findings made the headlines with some fascinating implications about what our
ancestors may have eaten. we have this visual of cavemen hunting woolly mammoth and eating large
chunks of meat around a fire, but new neanderthal fossils were found in italy and scientists studied
their teeth to try to figure out what they were eating. according to the guardian, analysis of their
dental tartar (that's hardened plaque) revealed a varied diet primarily made up of cereals
which may have contributed to the growth of their brains. whoa! honey, we gotta go to the store
we gotta get some cereal. now, i wouldn't put a ton of weight on those news for now, it's
not based on a peer-reviewed study yet, it's going off of a press release advertising the finding of
the fossils that got picked up by the press and we all know how that goes. but by complete coincidence,
also this week a new study, this one peer-reviewed, legit study, came out, also looking at neanderthal
fossils, and the scientists also studied their teeth. pretty busy week for dead people dentists
they examined hominid oral microbiome by analyzing dental biofilms. basically they looked at the dead
oral bacteria stuck to their teeth. isn't science amazing? the plaque hardens and preserves over time
so the scientists found plenty of archaeological dental calculus. i guess neanderthals weren't
exactly obsessed about their oral hygiene. by cataloguing the types of bacteria in their mouths,
we can infer what neanderthals were eating. they found a type of bacteria that binds to amylase
in our mouths, and amylase is an enzyme that breaks down starch into its glucose molecule components
and those bacteria are then right there ready to metabolize the glucose. they also verified that
the bacteria were specific to oral microbiome and their DNA had the typical damage seen in ancient
genetic material normally found in fossils, so it wasn't just modern contamination or something. so,
bottomline, the presence of bacteria that consume sugar on the teeth of neanderthals shows they
were eating more starchy foods. it was already known from earlier studies that neanderthals ate
grasses and tubers and maybe even cooked barley but this study suggests they ate so much starch
that it changed their oral microbiome, the bacteria in their mouths. so the findings reveal how much
they depended on plants. another expert explains: we sometimes give short shrift to plant foods but
we know from modern hunter-gatherers it's often the gathering that ends up providing
a substantial portion of the calories. maybe we should call them "gatherer hunters" instead
but the most provocative suggestion was that our ancestors had adapted to eating lots of starch
around the time they needed sugars to fuel a big expansion of their brains. to efficiently grow
a bigger brain they needed energy dense foods containing glucose. honey, we need potatoes too.
i know! now, i think this is still a little speculative. sure, the default fuel for our
brain is glucose, so it wouldn't exactly be a shock if concentrated glucose sources played a role in
brain development, but the truth is we don't really know what factors led to our brains growing so
much. there are many theories, some people say it's the meat, others say it's the vegetables
and on the internet people just pull to the foods they like. i think there's enough evidence that
it's compelling to say that hominids were eating cereals, grains, and starch long ago, but i wouldn't
really stretch it beyond that for now. wait, hold on a second, neanderthals went extinct though.
didn't homo sapiens wipe them out? maybe it was all that starch and grains. maybe their diet made them
unhealthy and that's why they lost to us. honey, throw away all the cereal. yeah, the potatoes too.
i know... except the same amylase-binding oral bacteria was also found in homo sapiens, which
supports an early importance of starch-rich foods in homo evolution. they've even shown
that we have more copies of the amylase gene in our genome, possibly as a result of dietary shifts
during the evolution of modern humans, specifically an increased reliance on starch-rich foods. so
we're literally adapted to it. which still doesn't mean those foods are healthier, more on that in a
second. we also know our ancestors were eating grains a hundred thousand years ago. experts go
as far as saying: the idea that prehistoric people didn't eat grains is just wrong, it's misinformed.
honey, we need the grains and the potatoes again. i know... okay, so our ancestors ate starch and grains
great. yayyy. what does that mean for you and me in 2021? not much. ancestor diets don't tell us which
foods help us meet our modern health goals. it's possible caveman diets are the best diet for us,
and it's possible they're not. this is one of the most pervasive misconceptions around
nutrition online because it just feels like it makes sense. what we ate for millennia should
shape our evolution, we should be adapted to it so it should be the healthiest diet for us. like
a hand and a glove. because this idea seems so intuitive at first glance, even though it doesn't
really have any scientific substance, it's become incredibly sticky. every time we try to explain
this in a video, somebody will write a very angry comment saying we're ignoring natural selection
or we're saying that millennia of evolution don't matter. quite the contrary, if anything
i'm biased towards evolutionary explanations. i've published entire papers on it and evolution is 100%
crucial to everything we do in bio research. which is exactly why we don't throw around evolution
like a buzzword without understanding how it works. jumping from "cavemen ate this food" to "therefore it
should be the healthiest for us" is just conjecture, it's a huge logical leap. there's no necessary link
all it tells us is that it's possible to develop and survive on that food, it tells us nothing
about relative health benefits compared to other food choices, especially long term, into midlife
and beyond. it's entirely possible that the same food that allows us to make it past childhood and
reproduce doesn't protect us from chronic disease later in life. heart disease, cancer, alzheimer's,
diabetes, all the major concerns of the western world. evolution doesn't really care what happens
to us in our 50s and 60s, we've already reproduced, we've already passed on our genes, there's little
if any evolutionary pressure to select for fitness long past our reproductive peak or even past
reproductive age altogether in the case of older women. it's even possible that the same food could
help early on but hurt, increase risk later in life, something called antagonistic pleiotropy, big word
but all it means is that the same factor can have contradictory effects. the same food could push us
through development and childhood, especially in a wild environment where calories are hard
to come by, and yet accelerate aging or raise risk of disease later in life. a food like that
would be great evolutionarily because it helps you reproduce but it would be terrible for our modern
health goals. all of this is entirely possible just off of what caveman ate so we can't assume overall
health effect of foods from ancestor diets. we need to actually test the health effects of foods
in living breathing humans, directly observe and compare them. modern studies, which we have by the
thousands. we sometimes even see people arguing that the science must be wrong when a food or
a nutrient is shown to increase risk because our ancestors ate it so how can it be bad? this logic
is colossally confused. for example, the same food can be benign at a lower dose and harmful
at a higher amount, or like we said, it can raise your risk of chronic disease that only manifests
later in life, in our 40s or 50s or 60s so it wouldn't really be subject to much evolutionary
pressure. this is especially true in the wild, where making it to adulthood and passing on our genes
is the main hurdle, so that early stage will have much stronger evolutionary weight than still being
healthy at 50. this is why every reputable organization issuing dietary recommendations
produces a list of references, a list of studies showing the actual effect of foods in modern
living humans. the american cancer society, the world health organization, the american college
of cardiology, the european health organizations, across the board. nobody says "well, cavemen did
it so it must be fine for us...". i've never seen a source with scientific substance use that argument,
the only place you hear it is in confused internet content like blogs or in netflix documentaries. so,
can we all just stop trying to justify our dietary preferences using cavemen? their diet wasn't vegan,
it wasn't low carb, it wasn't even paleo. and don't take it from me, take it from
a professional anthropologist: the paleo diet is really quite unrelated to the paleolithic,
it's a misnomer. we don't use the caveman precedent for anything else in our lives
if we have an infection, we take antibiotics. if we have a problem inside, we get surgery.
we vaccinate our kids to prevent them getting polio or tetanus. none of those things are natural,
we're not adapted to them, we do them because they've been tested and shown to be superior
to the alternatives. same logic goes for food, we should base our opinion on actual experimental
tests. i know that stories of cavemen hunting are much more exciting and visual and lists of studies
just put us all to sleep. i get that. but that's where the reliable and life-saving knowledge is
going to come from. the fact that our ancestors ate starch and grains, which is becoming pretty clear,
doesn't tell us if those foods are the healthiest for us or not. by all means include some whole
grains into your diet but do it because you like it or because the actual experimental evidence
indicates those foods are health-promoting, which we've covered here in several previous
videos, not because of what cavemen ate ages ago.