How do you tell somebody that you know nothing about the diet of paleolithic people without telling them that you know nothing about the diet of paleolithic people?
Just call those people a vegan. That's right.
One author is claiming that a certain tribe of Northwest African humans from around thirteen thousand BCE were vegans. Then this author does nothing to prove it or even remotely support that claim. Sounds more to me like a clickbait article, but it's still worth the discussion. After all, if we don't talk about it, people could be walking around and not talking about ideas and suppositions without ever questioning them,
and that is not good for anyone. So this story is from Joe dot co dot UK by Ryan Price on January eleventh, twenty twenty five. Guys, In reading this article, I found a great deal of misrepresentation here. Maybe a lack of understanding, maybe somebody just making wild claims just to get people to.
Click on the article.
I don't know, but this doesn't strike me as anywhere near true.
There are so many reasons for it, but.
I just want to say that you cannot take this small group of people in one corner of the world and then just characterize all prehistoric humans as being that way.
And so that's why initial thought on that. Yeah, I'm going to move to you first.
Let me get your initial thoughts on what this article was talking about.
I'm with you. I thought this article was a great example of poor reporting. The wording of the title was extremely misleading. The title was scientists find that cavement a mostly vegan diet in groundbreaking new study. First of all, we need to define some terms. Okay, caveman is like a layman's term that refers to any prehistoric human, not
in any specific human species or any specific time period. Right, Like, when you read this article further, you realize that he's talking about pitic humans in a very particular North African area. Then there's the term vegan, which we know is a word that you know elicits a lot of contention or I guess you could say strong emotions for meat eaters. So we have to make sure that we differentiate a
plant based diet from a vegan diet. A vegan diet does not include any type of animal products in any capacity and not just food.
Right.
If focuses on an animal warfare, then a plant based diet doesn't include meat, they are your eggs, but it can include other type of animal products. They can use the bones, they can use the skin of an animal, they can use their teeth to whatever they want, and the stuff often you know, like in modern times, a plant based diet is focused on improving individual help rather
than animal welfare. So I don't really think that Paleolithic people were worried about animal welfare, so you candually call them vecan.
Yeah.
So on that note, I want to flip to Jonathan, Yeah, what should this? Does this article give you any new found understanding of the way prehistoric or Paleolithic people lived?
Eight?
What did this author accomplish?
I think that the if I remember correctly, I did look up the paper and read into it a little bit. I didn't have time to finish it, so I won't go into anything that was in there because I don't feel competent to do so. However, I do know a little bit about biology. My second degree was almost finished when I in biology. But it would be more accurate to say they had less meat than the more northern
Paleolithic people and the Western hunter gatherers. They still ate meat, but meat was a significantly less important part of their diet. They're not vegan at all, and he actually, I don't think was saying that. However, the use of caveman is just the clickbait item. So that they weren't they were paleolithic humans, they weren't cavemen. A lot of them didn't live in caves, they had villages. You get over it interesting that they also had evidence that they cultivated grains.
How do they determine that? One way was dental carries cavities Dental cavities that were caused in a population by consumption of starchy plants. Starch is broken down into sugar in the mouth by amylade, which is an enzyme found in saliva. So if you eat starch without chewing it, you don't get as much calories out of it. Don't try that, but if you do want to figure it out, just take a cracker and chew it until it gets sweet.
You'll notice it. But the cavities in your teeth, and there was a lot of them in this population and they hadn't been found in more northernly population. So therefore the cavities are probably due to eating a lot of starchy plants and creating free floating sugar in your mouth, which then inspires bacteria and causes cavities. So that's one thing that I learned from this particular thing. But the paper was just all over the place as far as factually, So.
Yeah, right, I think the study was was more thorough than the actual article. I also got when I look at the actual study, and you know, it was focused on North Africa and Morocco and the researchers SOT said that, as Jonathan mentioned, they used all kinds of tests on the teats and kay and all of this in order to be able to tell what kind of diet they had, but also pointed out that this is just for that area.
You can't say from this study that all humans on that time period eight and mostly Vigian diet or whatever. That means that they were trying. The article was trying to say that they're going to continue to examine different sites because they want to determine if other Late Stone
Ash civilizations eat a similar diet. This is because our previous assumption was that Palalytic humans ate mostly meat, That's why they call it the paleodie, and that focuses you know, mostly only either like meat healthy fat, nuts, seeds, and all of these kind of whole foods.
Well, I want to stop there.
I want to stop there and just insert this before we move on, because I think it's important to talk about the location and to talk about what was going on at that time period. So number one, and I think most importantly, this author, I think fails to show that not all cave people or paleolithic people around thirteen thousand BCE, or really at any time period, were all monolithic. We're all the same, right. Cave people, Paleolithic people were opportunists,
and they ate what their environment gave them. They ate plants and lesumes if that's what was abundantly available. They ate fish if that was what was abundantly available, and if it was easier to hunt a take down small game or big game. You know, that was the thing that they centered their diet on, and it depended where you lived and what your capability was going to be based on the geography. Now, another thing that we have to remember is that thirteen thousand years BCE. I think
I said years ago. That's not correct, that would be about fifteen thousand years ago, but thirteen thousand years BCE.
You know, the northern Morocco.
Was not the Sahara of today. It was very lush, It was filled with streams and rivers, and there was probably a lot of fish. So I don't the thing that the author said. He said, well, when people picture caveman, they picture them taking down a big prey and roasting it over a fire.
Well that's not necessarily true.
I picture cavemen in some areas fishing a lot, right or you know, finding meat, finding food in other areas that are unlike people that are separated from them. So all that to say, yes, I think it's very important to identify this was a small patch of northern Africa thirty thousand years BCE and probably had nothing to do with the Mesopotamian cultures of thirteen thousand BCE or that of northern Europe. Like you guys pointed out, yeah, Egypt right where they could live.
Many thousands of years later.
So you know it's like, yeah, yeah, those are great points because people were also moving around a lot at those times. These civilizations weren't settled until about I think it will be like maybe five thousand years later or so, when the agricultural revolution started. You know, they started settling more and they were able to domesticate animals and you know, using their milk and using like all of the more animal products. So at the time that these periolithic humans lived,
it was as you said, very very importantistic. They just ate whatever they could cultivate, whether they were in a specific spot for like you know, a season, and then they moved somewhere else. Whatever, there was a bit amount of whatever they were going to start eating. It was just as they went.
They an explanation was there was an explanation of how they figured out that they were partially growing cereal foods was in a Procedures in the National Academy of Sciences USA, issue one to eleven, pages nine fifty four to nine fifty nine, and one of the things that says was the presence of early evidence linking hybrid This is about the cavities, high prevalence of carries to reliance on highly caryogenic wild plant foods, and police des hunter gatherers from
North Africa. This evidence predates other high carries populations and the first signs of food production by several thousand years. We infer that increased reliance on wild plants, rich infrementable carbohydrates caused an early shift towards a disease associated oral microboa biota. Which they're saying is that these people, by how much damage there was to their teeth, they actually
probably were doing horticulture, not agriculture. But you know, if they found fertile ground, they had seeds, they plant them and then when they came back they would use them. So there was a lot more of an abundance there. And as Jimmy pointed out, thirteen thousand DCE was a
very wet part. It was, you know, just as the ice age were starting to ice was starting to recede, and the Sahara where the desert is, was really kind of a savannah and in places a kind of jungly, so a lot of water and rivers in that going through there. It doesn't look like it now, but you know what I mean.
So I thought I highlighted that part too, so, quoting the author, the most remarkable aspect of this study is the revelation that this population developed ways to cultivate plant growth and harvest crops thousands of years before the agricultural revolution took place.
You know, I don't want to that's remarkable.
I don't want to give this group too much credit though, because I think what studies have shown and what I think some sources that I've come across just over my years in general, is that you know, while they were not building civilizations and they were more nomadic, it doesn't mean that they were leaving for good. I mean they would roam the same areas they would have areas they
would return to. Right, So they may have been nomadic, but they still had different hunting grounds, different feeding grounds, different places that they would go to to find the things that they needed. And probably one of the things they figured out was, remember when we ate all of those fruit and we left all the seeds or we left all that stuff there, weird that fruit just grew here.
And so they.
Probably before they turned it into a civilization, yeah, turned it into harvesting, turned it into horticulture, but were still very much on the move, and so it probably took a little while, probably took a population boom for people to start settling, because you know, there's only so far you can go until you run into other tribes that
you know, you run into issues. It's like, well, let's just settle here and keep doing this thing that we're doing, and so that that kind of fed into that h that development.
At least from what I've seen.
I'm no expert, and I never want to give the impression that I am one.
This is a thousand years after you know, after this was Godepe Tepe and those Anatolian settlements, so you know, you can see where this is kind of going. You know, the people up there were building not in the cities, but large settlements, but the people in north North Africa were still being hunter gatherers.
I do want to come back to that.
I want to come back to go Beckley Tepe because you that is a really good point to take me to where I want to bring this kind of development of civilization. But AJ you picked out this article, you thought the vegan topic would be great for this conversation because I am the resident vegan at least for tonight.
So I've been I've been doing a vegan diet for four months.
I'm not really a vegan though, I mean, think about it, So I'm a vegan, but I have children that are meat eaters that have leather shoes, So I am feeding the.
Machine that creates that abuses animals.
If you will I'm not a real vegan, and even if these people had a mostly vegan diet, we could never consider them vegan, could we?
And so ag I wanted to get your take on that.
Yeah, I feel the same way. And that's why, even when I've eaten whole foods plant based, I always continue to call myself plant based because I don't think that I could meet the vegan requirements to qualify I guess, so I mostly do it for my health. And when I came into the atheist community, I kind of started to also think about the animal warfare aspect. I remember I had a call with you and Objectively then and Forest and actually on the ACA channel the elities experience.
One thing that I was kind of always thinking about was on that call, and it kind of relates to this because it speaks to human evolution. Is that a lot of people think that humans have evolved to adapt to eating meat and that we get, you know, such a big significant benefit from it, but there are so many other factors that have helped increase or you know,
body size or strength. You know, we have more processed food, we have better healthcare, we have food access in general has increased, right, we have more fitness options to work, and we can work out and become stronger. We have medications that affect our body composition, among other things. So we know that humans truly have only been eating meat for about two million years, like and modern humans have only been a round for less than half a million years.
And as we just say, domestication of animals started ten thousand years ago. The Industrial Revolution was two hundred years ago. There is just not enough time for the true definition of evolution to have changed our bodies to have become accustomed to eating meat. That's right, don't require meat.
And you know what, so I want to jump in here because I have said before, like talking to Dan objectively Dan, that is the ACA's own objectively Dan from truth wanted and talking then you know, I said something like, well, the human body is not designed to eat the kind of meat that we eat today, and he's like, well,
what does that even mean? And I don't think I really explained it well, but you know, most scholars on this subject will say that, and like we talked about earlier, you know, depending on the environment would depend on the access to meat and how much you ate it. Some people even say that, you know, in some societies, Yeah, they had meat, but they strictly kept it for special ass you know, religious in the early days of religion developing,
maybe religious ceremonies or some kind of worship. You know, it wasn't a hallmark of their diet. Now people might eat a bacon cheeseburger every single day. You know, that is not what we are designed to do. And that's
what that's what I mean by that. You know, meat is fine if you want to talk about the way that humans have evolved, but we have pushed past what we are designed to do in so many ways, which is why we have so much chronic back pain and chronic other kind of pains and illnesses because we're not the sedentary people that we've turned into.
But we've created this life for ourselves.
So on that note that came from some of these settlements we developed that Jonathan, you started talking about go Beckley tepee. It's a tongue twister in Anatolia and in Eastern Europe and the other the other places like it. And I just want to give you a chance, Yeah, I want to give you a chance to expand on that a little bit. What is the significance of that between the connections that we're making about how Paleolithic people lived and and and maybe you know their relationship to
animal meat, nature, et cetera. I mean, what what's the significance there.
Well, I think the significance is the first thing we have to remember is that these are modern humans. They had slightly larger brains than we do, but they had a lot more sensory sensory processing necessary in their lives. So so that's the thing. They're modern humans. They're every bit as intelligent as we were are were.
Yeah, well, it depends, it depends on what you're referring to. Maybe were might be appropriate.
Yeah, but yeah, so definitely tech A Tepe and the other tepees around it that show fairly large settlements of of, you know, a couple thousand people. The significance of that is that this is the same area that agriculture started, the Anatolian area, and so you can image that we're just pushing the date back to where they may not have been permanent settlements, and they don't think they were at this point, but you're starting to see the seeds
of permanent settlements. Cities, large cities like these were what they're finding now we wouldn't consider them large, we would consider them a hamlet. But for that time, having that many people feeding off the same few square miles is a big accomplishment. So, you know, this is pretty interesting
in a lot of ways. I'm looking forward to when the rest of the anthropology and that comes out on it and how much they find out about this, because it's going to say a lot about what our ancestors and civilization itself became and started from.
So go Beckley Teppe.
From what I understand, only about five percent of it has been excavated. And what people think is that while it may not have been a permanent settlement in the way that we think about it, they actually do think that ultiple tribes, multiple societies in that area use that site, worked together on that site to build some kind of ritual area or trading post, and it might not.
Have belonged to only one person.
But these societies, these early societies, or these early settlements, can represent maybe the first kind of international relations, if you will, the first uh, the first the first.
Yeah, interconnected society.
And that is where I wanted to tie it to because this is the atheist community of allten uh.
We like to talk about religious issues.
And therefore, when we go back through this whole conversation that we've just had and we look at early humans figuring out that they can cultivate crops and then later saying, well, why don't we just stay here? And then we start to see settlements developed. That is where religion actually starts
to really take form. Not to say that the foraging societies didn't have their own religions, but in the development of these societies, these settlements that relied on rain water, you might see them adhering to worship of a storm god like I don't know, yahweh, like l like so many other storm gods that were over these societies that needed these storms in order to grow their crops and
feed their animals. And unlike the societies at the longitudinal lines or in the beneficial areas, if you will, where rivers overflooded, well, they had a steady supply of water, right, so they didn't worship or storm god.
They might have worshiped the god of the sky or the god of the moon or something different.
And anyway, you know, the way that the way that we settled and the way that we built our settlements, the way that we kind of determined what we needed created the gods, right, And I think that is such a fascinating story.
And I don't want to take up take up.
The space for the end of this segment by just kind of blabbering on about my fascination with this time period. So I'll give you guys a minute each to close out, and then we could call it good for this week.
Jonathan, I'll start with you.
I think that as we find the initial points where different clans got together and different organizations got together to start creating society and start religious activities, I find it fascinating and I'm really looking forward to all the research that comes out of it when they start excavating the rest of these sites, and including the ones in North Africa, to show how we evolved into what our societies evolved into what they are now.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm proud to be human, you know, I mean, I get, well, you know what, I get so sucked into. I know, I'm sometimes really disappointed to be human being, Okay, but I really get I really envy the people that came before us. They had it tough, they had it tough, and they managed to survive anyway, AJ please close us out.
I don't have anything deep like you guys to say, but I'm going to say that if there's anything that these article should have taught us is rather than that they were vegan or whatever they said, is that this threw off the whole paleo diet because the main aspect of the palaeo diet is not to eat quins, and we just found out that they ate quins.
So yeah, good point. I mean, our new understanding of the paleo diet right. And again, even if they ate largely plant based, they couldn't have been vegan. They were making clothes out of hides and weapons out of bones, and so you know, catchy, catchy article titled nice try, nice try, but you.
Haven't told us anyway.
The reason the reason I love being a host that the ACA is the wide array of things that we can cover and getting into early human history.
Is something that I'm passionate about.
And I could tell that you guys are as well, and I just I really thank you for joining. I really appreciate this conversation tonight. And that's going to do it for this week. So everybody, thank you for tuning in and