At Darwin’s Table

So in my last post I argued that no hunter gatherer societies alive today eat a high amount of saturated fats. But this got me thinking. Nearly all hunter gatherer societies alive today tend to live near the equator. It is well known in zoology that the further you move from the equator and to the poles the larger the animals tend to be and the higher the amount of adipose tissue. We have the Inuits of course, but they are more of a marine hunter and as a result will eat animals with low saturated fats as this is typically the fatty acid composition of marine mammals. Could it have been possible that our ice age ancestors hunting terrestrial (land-based) animals had a diet high in saturated fats?

So I thought of the most obvious animal that would have existed alongside our ice age ancestors and that may have been on the main course frequently. The obvious example is the woolly mammoth. A huge animal that could have easily supplied many meals to those willing to hunt them. But did we hunt them? A recent paper used mathematical modeling to determine the climate conditions over eons of time and mammoth abundance according to fossil records. It found that the mighty mammoths had been pushed to the edge of extinction many times as the ice sheets retreated with the withdrawal of many ice ages. However, it was the last one, when they faced human pressure that drove them to extinction. Thus, indeed humans hunted the wooly mammoths, and this is further backed by archaeological evidence that also points to the fact that humans hunted the wooly mammoth as early as 1.8 millions years ago.

So what was the fatty acid composition of the wooly mammoth? The front part of a baby mammoth’s body was found in Olchan mine in the Oimyakon Region of Yakutia. The baby mammoth’s skin was extremely well preserved. There were adipose deposits along the neck and practically from the skull foundation through to the withers area, the adipose deposits were up to seven centimetres thick. These deposits formed real adipose “pockets” and they reached over to the body sides. Stone age artists used to draw mammoths with big humps on their backs and it is now believed that they used to accumulate these massive adipose deposits in order to help them survive severe weather conditions with long food and water shortages. 

However, one more question needs to be answered. Was this true for the woolly mammoth or true for all mammals found within such environmental conditions. If so, then it could easily be argued that hunter gatherers in the ice ages would have had ready access to huge sources of saturated fat.  You don’t have to look far to find living examples. I thought to myself, if gaining massive amounts of adipose tissue is a common trait of land based animals that need to survive severely cold winters I need to find a living example that has to undergo the same pressures. The obvious cases in point lived in the Arctic. Two of these, the polar bear and the arctic fox, are land based mammals that must undergo extreme cold conditions during winter with little food available. Not surprisingly, both animals build up huge stores of body fat and adipose tissue during spring and summer in preparation for the long winter. Thus, it seems that large amounts of body fat stored in adipose tissue would have been an extremely common trait amongst the land based mammals of the ice age. As such it is highly likely that saturated fats would have served an important role in the diet of our ice age hunter gatherer brethren. 

Food

Today I woke up and was quite famished. So I had some strawberries and some schnitzel with onions, tomato and avocado. 

Later I had more along the same theme. Schnitzel, onion, courgettes, tomatoes and a salad

For an afternoon snack I had some pumpkin soup. 

For dinner I made a huge pork roast to last me over the next few days. I had it with some brocolli. 

Nutrition and Exercise

I actually missed doing the calorie counting (orthorexic, me?) so its back. 

No Exercise