How similar is your life to that of a homo sapiens from 12,000 years ago? If you made it more similar, would that help you?
Why pick that arbitrary point in our evolution? My ancestors 12k years ago could have been subsistence farmers who toiled all day but ate a lot of calories. Could be cold climate hunter-gatherers who fasted intermittently between giant feasts, and burned most of these calories to zero, trying to secure a next big kill. Could have been tropical climate hunter-gatherers who did light hunting and gathering 2-3 hours a day, ate small meals, and played lazily all day. And this only takes into account the ancestors from exactly 12k years ago. What about ancestors from 6k years ago? What about 200 k years ago? To make matters more complex, different ancestries would call for different lifestyle and diet. Our natural metabolism, lactose tolerance, muscularity, fat % and countless other factors vary wildly between ancestries. A lifestyle/diet fit for a descendant of the Innuit would not be fit for a descenant of the X!hosa and vice-versa.
Human evolution is an ongoing process that takes different populations into wildly different directions, so it is not obvious what is the “natural environment” for each human, unless they are literally living a stone-age life right now, in absolute genetic and technological isolation.
12,000 years ago is the approximate date for the appearance of agriculture. I mean that our lifestyle fundamentally changed with agriculture, and evolution did not have much time to adapt.
“To make matters more complex, different ancestries would call for different lifestyle and diet. Our natural metabolism, lactose tolerance, muscularity, fat % and countless other factors vary wildly between ancestries.”—That may be true but that’s not the point. The lifestyle of an Innuit ancestor was probably much more similar to that of an Ethiopian ancestor than either of them are to our own lifestyle. The 21rst century is really weird, that’s my point.
what Im getting at, is that while the evidence for oldest agriculture is from around 12k-10k, this is not the same as saying that your particular ancestors come from a line that used agriculture for solid 10k years straight (unless you are from very specific Anatolian or Iraq genetic lines).
It could easily be the case that your ancestors had been eating grain and dairy for 500 generations, or maybe just 10 generations or less.
One example of what Im talking about is lactose tolerance which allows one to consume dairy. It is a mutation that is only roughly 8k years old, and thats only if you are of Anatolian/Turkish ancestry.
Another would be protein madness, which rarely happens among Sub-Polar people, but affects Europeans who moved North.
Similarly, our genetic predisposition towards certain reactions to gluten, high-protein diet, high fructose diet, even alcohol vary wildly.
In most cases, when we think of “modern” diet and lifestyle, we are basically thinking of the industrialized, grain and dairy Anglo-Saxon diet and a life of small caloric surplus over a relatively modest caloric expenditure. Which affects you different if you indeed are of Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and your ancestors had been eating cheese and bread for at least 6k years, while slowly reducing the amount of labor needed to create it.
Its going to hit you differently if your ancestors were Sub-Polar peoples who subsisted on high-fat/zero carb diet, or came from a tropical jungle where they subsisted on high-sugar fruit, low fat meat and minimum labor to procure it.
Why pick that arbitrary point in our evolution? My ancestors 12k years ago could have been subsistence farmers who toiled all day but ate a lot of calories. Could be cold climate hunter-gatherers who fasted intermittently between giant feasts, and burned most of these calories to zero, trying to secure a next big kill. Could have been tropical climate hunter-gatherers who did light hunting and gathering 2-3 hours a day, ate small meals, and played lazily all day.
And this only takes into account the ancestors from exactly 12k years ago. What about ancestors from 6k years ago? What about 200 k years ago?
To make matters more complex, different ancestries would call for different lifestyle and diet. Our natural metabolism, lactose tolerance, muscularity, fat % and countless other factors vary wildly between ancestries. A lifestyle/diet fit for a descendant of the Innuit would not be fit for a descenant of the X!hosa and vice-versa.
Human evolution is an ongoing process that takes different populations into wildly different directions, so it is not obvious what is the “natural environment” for each human, unless they are literally living a stone-age life right now, in absolute genetic and technological isolation.
12,000 years ago is the approximate date for the appearance of agriculture. I mean that our lifestyle fundamentally changed with agriculture, and evolution did not have much time to adapt.
“To make matters more complex, different ancestries would call for different lifestyle and diet. Our natural metabolism, lactose tolerance, muscularity, fat % and countless other factors vary wildly between ancestries.”—That may be true but that’s not the point. The lifestyle of an Innuit ancestor was probably much more similar to that of an Ethiopian ancestor than either of them are to our own lifestyle. The 21rst century is really weird, that’s my point.
what Im getting at, is that while the evidence for oldest agriculture is from around 12k-10k, this is not the same as saying that your particular ancestors come from a line that used agriculture for solid 10k years straight (unless you are from very specific Anatolian or Iraq genetic lines).
It could easily be the case that your ancestors had been eating grain and dairy for 500 generations, or maybe just 10 generations or less.
One example of what Im talking about is lactose tolerance which allows one to consume dairy. It is a mutation that is only roughly 8k years old, and thats only if you are of Anatolian/Turkish ancestry.
Another would be protein madness, which rarely happens among Sub-Polar people, but affects Europeans who moved North.
Similarly, our genetic predisposition towards certain reactions to gluten, high-protein diet, high fructose diet, even alcohol vary wildly.
In most cases, when we think of “modern” diet and lifestyle, we are basically thinking of the industrialized, grain and dairy Anglo-Saxon diet and a life of small caloric surplus over a relatively modest caloric expenditure. Which affects you different if you indeed are of Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and your ancestors had been eating cheese and bread for at least 6k years, while slowly reducing the amount of labor needed to create it.
Its going to hit you differently if your ancestors were Sub-Polar peoples who subsisted on high-fat/zero carb diet, or came from a tropical jungle where they subsisted on high-sugar fruit, low fat meat and minimum labor to procure it.
Humans are 99.9% genetically similar. I don’t care about the specifics. That’s not the point.