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HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): By 2050, the planet will have 2 billion more people on it than it has now. Just how to feed all of those people is a question being explored in the September issue of National Geographic magazine. It’s all part of an eight-month series that begins by looking at the popular Paleo Diet, and what we think our ancestors ate may not actually be the case.
Earlier, I spoke with Ann Gibbons, author of part one, “The Evolution of Diet” and the book, "The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors."
So, in your reporting you discover that it’s not as much about man the hunter as it is woman the forager. Explain that.
ANN GIBBONS, author: Yeah, it’s really interesting. So the Paleo diet as we know it today focuses on a lot of meat. It assumes our ancestors were like Neanderthals or cave men going out and hunting and eating big slabs of bloody meat every day.
The reality when you go talk to anthropologists, and this is what I did for the National Geographic article in September. I interviewed a lot of anthropologists and then I went to visit indigenous people and hunter-gatherers and people that are eating traditional diets. The reality is when you see these people and what they eat – they don’t get that much meat. And they don’t get that much meat because hunting is hard work.
While the men go out every day practically and hunt and spend many hours out, even with rifles today, often come back empty-handed. And I saw this for myself with the Chimani foragers in the Amazon, and it was confirmed by anthropologists that I talked to.
And what they rely on are the plants, the fruits, the vegetables that the women and children gather. This is known from studying many traditional people today and also from records in the fossil, records from looking at remnants of food, the plants, the fossils, the molecules that they ate.
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