https://www.businessinsider.com/what-foods-looked-like-befor...
The idea of four guys going into the woods and spearing a deer is a myth, a false parallel to modern sport hunting. Beaters pushed the prey towards kill zones. Fires could be set to get game moving. Fences would be biult to funnel game. And everyone was involved in processing the kill. Sure, maybe the big guys threw the spears but that was actually a small part of the process. The safest kill would always have been that where the animal injured itself first, no big guy muscles required. So there were plenty of jobs for all abilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_kite
https://explorersweb.com/hiker-discovers-iron-age-reindeer-f...
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/northern-yukon...
>> The most technologically sophisticated is the caribou fence complex. Ten of these complexes have been studied by archaeologists in the northern Yukon and nearly 40 others have been recorded in adjacent Alaska. The oldest surviving fences date to the early 1800s, but oral history suggests fences may have been used for thousands of years; they were last used about 1910.
The same is true for agriculture. Even today, with all of our mechanical wizardry, farmers on the plains still pull their kids out of school to help during harvest.
Note that many early humans lived in "hot and relatively stable climates".
Or a knapsack of dried fatty meat with a fairly indefinite shelf life.
Our bodies evolved to store fat for this very reason—future energy needs. Ancient humans lived feast or famine, and our biology adapted. We’re built to fast for days, using body fat for energy. When carbs are available, they’re preferred because they are faster and easier to burn.
Sugar is carbs. But ancient fruit in no way resembles today’s cultivated monstrosities, in appearance or sugar content.
Our modern problem is—we gorge on carbs all day long. So our body helpfully stores the excess as body fat for future use—because it expects eventual ‘famine’ where we’ll be fasting with few carbs available and need it. But we never let our body get to burn that fat.
As intensity increases during exercise, the body starts releasing muscle glycogen. If previously the muscles were mostly using fat (because no exogenous carbs were available), now that endogenous carbs are ready, the muscles will use them instead. You cannot, however, reduce muscle glycogen use by supplementing extra carbs.
But the fastest accessible energy source is glycogen, which comes from carbs.
Human body prefers ketones as a source of energy. But glycogen is faster.
My simplified mental model is like this. Ketones are normal gasoline. And glycogen is racing fuel (ethanol). If you run a stock car on racing fuel it may start and drive for a while but it’s damaging the engine and creates unnecessary wear.
Ketone supplements have been available for a while, and nobody was able to show any benefit of using them. 100% snake oil.
If on the other hand you want to produce ketones endogenously, you basically have to put your body in a state of starvation. It’s not really gasoline then, more like burning the passenger seats as fuel so you can arrive at the destination.
While meat was definitely a caloric bonanza for early humans, recent primate studies offer evidence that sugary fruits continued to be a critical “brain food.” A 2017 paper looked at 140 primate species and compared their brain sizes with their diets.
“What [that study] showed very clearly was that the fruit-eaters, the frugivores, had 25 percent bigger brains, on average, than the folivores, the leaf-eaters,” Brand-Miller says. The fruit-eaters also had bigger brains than the omnivores, which ate meat.
A central role for dietary sugars in human evolution - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aed8437
the paper centrally discussed.
My curiosity leads me more towards, are their other primates that had similar / convergent evolution that independently discovered dense protein sources? Is homo sapien really just a path of singular linear "march of progress" evolution? Were there other marches of progress from other primates or any other species that we competed against or merged with? Those kind of questions become more interesting once you realize the diet combination that creates big brains
if they have abundant sources of carb-sugar, there would be no selection pressure to evolve in a particular direction.
When we’re capable of eating animals raw. And bugs and worms etc.
Whereas in order to consume a wider variety of plants, cooking and other more complex perpetrations are absolutely necessary.
It also probably was helpful for other reasons. You could store cooked meat easier/longer without refrigeration or kill off some of the bacteria and such making it healthier.
Also much like today, early humans did not do so if there was a way to cook it.
Then again, I know fruitarian who runs ultramarathons. He eats only sugar, so clearly human body can run on two different fuels very well.
Maybe we shouldn’t mix them but choose just the other? Carbs or fat. It would make sense that if there are two paths to get energy from eating, the system may not run optimally if you keep feeding both at the same time?