Early Humans Likely Ate Carbs and Sugary Foods

Fruit were completely different and a lot less sugary and more starchy than they are today. We wouldn’t recognize most fruit neither by look nor by taste.

https://www.businessinsider.com/what-foods-looked-like-befor...

> fruit harvested

Also tubers.

Everyone participated in everything. Getting food was basically 90% of everyone's day. When berries were in season, which might only be a week or two, everyone picked berries. When the salmon migrated, everyone worked the river. And then, when there were no plants in season and the only calories were from hunting, everyone supported the hunt.

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.

So we’re expected to believe each man is carry a basket of rapidly deteriorating fruit (and tubers).

Or a knapsack of dried fatty meat with a fairly indefinite shelf life.

To nitpick: at rest, muscle cells use fat over carbs to produce ATP. It is only during effort that the cells start to use more carbs than fat. The rest of the post is, to my understanding, correct.

Body’s preferred food source is ketones. It functions most optimally when using ketones.

But the fastest accessible energy source is glycogen, which comes from carbs.

How do we know that? Any sources?

That’s false. Carbs are not a requirement for human body. Proof of that are native populations living far north, exclusively off of animal food sources.

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.

Kind of; humans do adapt remarkably well to low-glucose diets, and we can produce glycogen without sugary inputs via gluconeogenesis. They do make it much easier, though.

My interpretation was similar. The carb-sugar diet was never a highlight because it was a given. The article talks about primates that have high carb-sugar diets but doesn't explain why their brains remain so small compared to humans. Maybe they will eventually evolve? Maybe cooked meat / dense protein is the X factor? If so, that takes back to the beginning and highlights protein. It seems reasonable the combination of the two would be important. Protein enables muscle development, human evolution made us exceptionally well-suited for long-distance and endurance travel compared to all other living primates. This further improves are ability to forage and is just an evolutionary winning combination.

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

Interesting, but I've read for a long time, that our humanoid predecessors at some point figured out how to get to bone marrow with tools. That provided the energy dense food as well an evolutionary impetus to develop larger brains to build better tools and handle them better. Fire and the capability to cook were developed much later.

Cooking also increases the energy available from plant matter, particularly starchy tubers.

Why is it assumed that learning to cooking animals is a necessary hurdle?

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.

Does this mean you are a human??

anyone who reads Gary Taubes

Why would that make sense? People are always coming up with diets that look something like “stop eating bananas because they have been secretly making you sick and only eat blueberries which cleanse all your toxins” (and whatever variants thereof). It makes sense in a “doctors hate this one simple trick” sense but not biologically.

Humans seem to do alright with most diets except for the eat too much one