Paleo diet update: Carbs in tubers key to humans’ evolutionary boon

early man using fire

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

Scientists have long recognized that the diets of our ancestors went through a profound shift with the addition of meat. But in the September issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology, researchers argue that another item added to the menu was just as important: carbohydrates, bane of today’s paleo diet enthusiasts.

In fact, the scientists propose, by incorporating cooked starches into their diet, our ancestors were able to fuel the evolution of our oversized brains.

At some point hominins began to cook meat, but exactly when they invented fire is a question that inspires a lot of debate. Humans were definitely making fires by 300,000 years ago, but some researchers claim to have found campfires dating back as far as 1.8 million years.

Cooked meat provided increased protein, fat and energy, helping hominins grow and thrive. But Mark G. Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London, and his colleagues argue that there was another important food sizzling on the ancient hearth: tubers and other starchy plants.

Cooking would have made wild tubers much more nutritious to humans, he noted, “which is not to be sniffed at, especially if you’re a very hungry Pleistocene hunter-gatherer.”

The fossil record shows a drastic acceleration in the size of hominin brains starting roughly 800,000 years ago. Today our outsize brains use up as much as a quarter of the calories we burn.

Read full, original post: For Evolving Brains, a ‘Paleo’ Diet Full of Carbs

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