Did Stone Age People Eat Grains (Much)?

Toban Wiebe brought this to my attention on the paleo-libertarian forum.

I laughed at the title:

U of C archeologist finds Stone Age man better fed than previously thought

So conventional wisdom, eh? Stone Age man was poorly fed and eating grains makes you better fed than not...

First, as well discussed by Michael Eades here, all evidence indicates stone age hunter-gatherers eating no grains normally had superior nutritional status compared to their grain-eating descendants.

Second, modern hunter-gatherers eating grain-free diets clearly maintain a nutritional status superior to most if not all grain-eating populations. Eating grains will make you better fed than not only if you have to choose between eating grains and starvation (and therein may lie the key to understanding this research…read on).

Then the first sentence:

"Long thought to have been full of mainly roots, fruit and nuts, Stone Age man's pantry may also have included wild cereal grains, research suggests."

Uh, why no mention of meat? And why the "may have"? Just finding grass seeds in middens doesn't prove that the people ate them in enough quantity to have any significant effect on human evolution.

And on what basis will you assert that a grains will perforce enhance a diet “full of mainly roots, fruit, and nuts”? Kitavans eat roots (sweet potatoes), fruits, nuts (coconut), and fish and don’t suffer any nutritional deficiencies due to lack of grains. Grains don’t provide any nutrients not found in vegetables, fruits, and nuts, whereas the latter three contain many nutrients not found in grains (vitamin C and carotenes, for examples).

Then it goes on:

"Mercader says it has been hypothesized that the use of starch represented a critical step in human evolution. That's because it improved the quality of the diet in the African savannahs and woodlands where the modern human line is believed to have first evolved.

This could be considered one of the earliest examples of that dietary transformation, he says."

Uh, by 100, 000 years ago we already had big brained people walking the earth, and most likely had already exploited starch from tubers and roots, which can provide it in much larger quantities than wild grass seeds. Just what does he think "evolved" under the influence of some sorghum seeds, beside possibly our amylase output?

I don’t know what "quality" of diet he thinks a few grass seeds will improve. As abundantly proved by modern African foragers, meat with tubers, vegetables, fruits, nuts will make a complete diet without cereals, so I don't see how grass seeds could improve the quality of such a diet, unless some factor had cut off supplies of some or all of these more nutrient-dense foods.

I wonder if Mercader knows that The Journey of Man out of Africa began only 50K years ago, likely due to climate change (drought) that drove big game north, with ancestors of the !Kung apparently the first to leave.



So if some people did eat grass seeds 100K years ago in Africa, they probably did it because drought-driven drops in stocks of wild game drove them to desperation to eat seeds having far less nutritional value than the game meat that they preferred but had trouble getting.

As Richard Nikoley (www.freetheanimal.com) pointed out on the paleo-libertarian forum:

“Why, with all the massive evidence showing we sourced animals above all is it a problem when one small population, probably faced with hunger resorted to the labor intensity of gathering seeds?

I think that's a strike in favor of evolution, not against our primary sources of nutrition.

I'd happily eat grains too, if I was hungry and couldn't kill & slaughter enough animals to feed me and mine.

But I'll bet they were still on the lookout. That's why in addition to bakeries, nowadays, we've also got Ruth's Chris.”

As Spencer Wells shows in The Journey of Man (embedded above), people didn’t leave Africa to follow the spread of grass seeds, they left to follow game seeking greener pastures.

From this press release, Mercader seems a bit anthropologically and nutritionally naive for someone doing that kind of research. I hope his article in Science is more informed than this news release. I have my doubts, though.