Despite its name, the Paleo Diet is a new food trend, one which has become increasingly popular in recent years. The diet’s basic tenet is that our bodies haven’t yet evolved to cope with the changes to our food intake as a result of agriculture. Paleo Diet aficionados hold that grains like wheat are making us fat and unhealthy, and that we would be far better off if we ate how our ancient ancestors did, focusing on lean meats, fruits and vegetables.
What researchers haven’t been able to answer, however, is exactly what our ancestors ate. Early humans and our other hominin predecessors lived pretty much everywhere, in environments as diverse as the Arctic, tropical rainforests and deserts, and so its likely that diet varied by region. Even within a given region, reconstructions of diet have had to rely on tooth analysis or bones found nearby.
A quartet of papers published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have instead turned to stable isotope analysis, which analyzes the specific chemical signature of molecules, to determine the diets of a variety of ancient hominin species by looking at their fossilized teeth. The findings show that human ancestors started moving away from the traditional ape diet of fruit and leaves about 2.5 million years ago—much earlier than previously thought. Thus, even our “paleo” ancestors may never have eaten a paleo diet.
