Bergin & Garvey 2002 FROM THE DUST JACKET Diet is key to understanding the past, present, and future of our species. Much of human evolutionary success can be attributed to our ability to consume a wide range of foods. Conversely, recent changes in the types of foods we eat may lie at the root of numerous modern health problems. Dealing with and solving these problems requires an understanding of what the human diet used to be-and how it has evolved. Studies of traditional peoples, non-human primates, human fossil and archaeological remains, nutritional chemistry, and evolutionary medicine-to name only a few-all contribute to our knowledge of the human diet's evolution. Yet analyses are increasingly specialized, isolating researchers and narrowing their focuses. This volume unifies authors schooled in a variety of academic disciplines to establish a more cohesive view of the human diet's past. Demonstrating how historical diets are reconstructed using both direct analogies with living traditional peoples and with non-human primates, this book also includes important studies of the bones and teeth of fossils. Understanding our ancestral diets will reveal the link between nutrition and health, suggesting alterations to our current diets in the pursuit of greater health. About the Editors: Peter S. Ungar is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas. Mark F. Teaford is Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. CONTENTS 1. Perspectives on the Evolution of Human Diet 1 Peter S. Ungar and Mark F. Teaford 2. Evolution, Diet, and Health 7 S. Boyd Eaton, Stanley B. Eaton III, and Loren Cordain 3. Post-Pleistocene Human Evolution: Bioarcheology of the Agricultural Transition 19 Clark Spencer Larsen 4. Early Childhood Health in Foragers 37 Sara Stinson 5. Meat-Eating, Grandmothering, and the Evolution of Early Human Diets 49 James O'Connell, Kristen Hawkes, and Nicholas Blurton Jones 6. A Two-Stage Model of Increased Dietary Quality in Early Hominid Evolution: The Role of Fiber 61 Nancy Lou Conklin-Brittain, Richard W. Wrangham, and Catherine C. Smith 7. Plants of the Apes: Is There a Hominoid Model for the Origins of the Hominid Diet? 77 Peter S. Rodman 8. Hunter-Gatherer Diets: Wild Foods Signal Relief from Diseases of Affluence 111 Katharine Milton 9. Hominid Dietary Niches from Proxy Chemical Indicators in Fossils: The Swartkrans Example 123 Julia Lee-Thorp 10. Paleontological Evidence for the Diets of African Plio-Pleistocene Hominins with Special Reference to Early Homo 143 Mark F. Teaford, Peter S. Ungar, and Frederick E. Grine Bibliography 167 Index 201 About the Editors and Contributors 205 EXERPT FROM CHAPTER ONE: "Perspectives on the Evolution of Human Diet" Peter S. Ungar and Mark F. Teaford "You are what you eat." The adage is so commonly used nowadays that people rarely think about its implications. In essence, "diet" is a key to understanding our past, present, and future. Much of the evolutionary success of our species can be attributed to our ability to procure, process, and consume a wide range of foods. However, recent changes in our diet (e.g., increased intake of such things as saturated fat, refined carbohydrates, and sodium, and decreased intake of nonnutrient fiber) may lie at the root of many of the health problems swamping our health care systems (O'Dea and Sinclair, 1983; Angel, 1984; Eaton and Konner, 1985; Hamilton, 1987; Eaton et al., 1988a,b; Burkett and Eaton, 1989; Cohen, 1989; Eaton et al., 1997). Moreover, if we are to understand and successfully cope with the world population pressures and potential food shortages looming on the horizon in the next century, we need every bit of information we can gather on diet and its influence on our lives. Fortunately, over the past few decades, there has been a veritable explosion of data generated by scientific research. This has brought a flood of new information to the study of what we eat, how we eat, and why we eat it, and it has included data from a variety of fields, ranging from studies of traditional peoples, nonhuman primates, human fossil and archeological remains, nutritional chemistry, evolutionary medicine, and others. The problem is that, with this range of perspectives, researchers have often traveled in different circles, with one group being unaware of the other's recent work. Nutritional anthropologists, ethnographers, physiologists, primatologists, functional morphologists, and paleontologists are all key to monitoring what we eat; how we eat, and why we eat what we eat. On the one hand, such subdivisions of expertise give some indication of the variety of interests and approaches that can be brought to bear on the topic of the evolution of human diet. On the other hand, no one perspective can convey the complexity of the topic-we need insights from every possible perspective. Unfortunately, by its very complexity, such an array of approaches is hard to pull together into a coherent whole, for, as data analyses and applications become more specialized, researchers become more narrowly focused and isolated. This book follows from a symposium that brought together researchers with different approaches to the study of the evolution of human diet. The symposium, entitled "Origins and Evolution of Human Diet," was held at the Fourteenth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. The idea was to bring together people schooled in a variety of academic disciplines so that we might begin to build a more complete view than any one perspective would allow. As Eaton and coauthors (1997) wrote, "to reconcile current nutritional recommendations with the nutrition which shaped our metabolic needs during our evolution, [we need] a comprehensive integration of multiple dietary variables." WHERE TO ORDER Bergin and Garvey 88 Post Road West Westport, CT 06881 Phone: 800-225-5800 Fax: 203-7509790 Web site: www.greenwood.com PRICE: $58.95 ISBN: 0-89789-736-6 Book received: 9-05-02 Posted date: 9-12-02
URL: http://www.primate.wisc.edu/pin/review/humandiet.html
Page last modified:
September 12, 2002
Maintained by the WPRC Library
Return to Review Copies Received
Return to PIN Home Page