Speaker 1: How do you tell somebody that you know nothing about
Speaker 1: the diet of paleolithic people without telling them that you
Speaker 1: know nothing about the diet of paleolithic people?
Speaker 2: Just call those people a vegan. That's right.
Speaker 1: One author is claiming that a certain tribe of Northwest
Speaker 1: African humans from around thirteen thousand BCE were vegans. Then
Speaker 1: this author does nothing to prove it or even remotely
Speaker 1: support that claim. Sounds more to me like a clickbait article,
Speaker 1: but it's still worth the discussion. After all, if we
Speaker 1: don't talk about it, people could be walking around and
Speaker 1: not talking about ideas and suppositions without ever questioning them,
Speaker 1: and that is not good for anyone. So this story
Speaker 1: is from Joe dot co dot UK by Ryan Price
Speaker 1: on January eleventh, twenty twenty five. Guys, In reading this article,
Speaker 1: I found a great deal of misrepresentation here. Maybe a
Speaker 1: lack of understanding, maybe somebody just making wild claims just
Speaker 1: to get people to.
Speaker 2: Click on the article.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but this doesn't strike me as anywhere
Speaker 1: near true.
Speaker 2: There are so many reasons for it, but.
Speaker 1: I just want to say that you cannot take this
Speaker 1: small group of people in one corner of the world
Speaker 1: and then just characterize all prehistoric humans as being that way.
Speaker 2: And so that's why initial thought on that. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 2: going to move to you first.
Speaker 1: Let me get your initial thoughts on what this article
Speaker 1: was talking about.
Speaker 3: I'm with you. I thought this article was a great
Speaker 3: example of poor reporting. The wording of the title was
Speaker 3: extremely misleading. The title was scientists find that cavement a
Speaker 3: mostly vegan diet in groundbreaking new study. First of all,
Speaker 3: we need to define some terms. Okay, caveman is like
Speaker 3: a layman's term that refers to any prehistoric human, not
Speaker 3: in any specific human species or any specific time period. Right, Like,
Speaker 3: when you read this article further, you realize that he's
Speaker 3: talking about pitic humans in a very particular North African area.
Speaker 3: Then there's the term vegan, which we know is a
Speaker 3: word that you know elicits a lot of contention or
Speaker 3: I guess you could say strong emotions for meat eaters.
Speaker 3: So we have to make sure that we differentiate a
Speaker 3: plant based diet from a vegan diet. A vegan diet
Speaker 3: does not include any type of animal products in any
Speaker 3: capacity and not just food.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: If focuses on an animal warfare, then a plant based
Speaker 3: diet doesn't include meat, they are your eggs, but it
Speaker 3: can include other type of animal products. They can use
Speaker 3: the bones, they can use the skin of an animal,
Speaker 3: they can use their teeth to whatever they want, and
Speaker 3: the stuff often you know, like in modern times, a
Speaker 3: plant based diet is focused on improving individual help rather
Speaker 3: than animal welfare. So I don't really think that Paleolithic
Speaker 3: people were worried about animal welfare, so you candually call
Speaker 3: them vecan.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So on that note, I want to flip to Jonathan, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what should this? Does this article give you any new
Speaker 1: found understanding of the way prehistoric or Paleolithic people lived?
Speaker 4: Eight?
Speaker 1: What did this author accomplish?
Speaker 4: I think that the if I remember correctly, I did
Speaker 4: look up the paper and read into it a little bit.
Speaker 4: I didn't have time to finish it, so I won't
Speaker 4: go into anything that was in there because I don't
Speaker 4: feel competent to do so. However, I do know a
Speaker 4: little bit about biology. My second degree was almost finished
Speaker 4: when I in biology. But it would be more accurate
Speaker 4: to say they had less meat than the more northern
Speaker 4: Paleolithic people and the Western hunter gatherers. They still ate meat,
Speaker 4: but meat was a significantly less important part of their diet.
Speaker 4: They're not vegan at all, and he actually, I don't
Speaker 4: think was saying that. However, the use of caveman is
Speaker 4: just the clickbait item. So that they weren't they were
Speaker 4: paleolithic humans, they weren't cavemen. A lot of them didn't
Speaker 4: live in caves, they had villages. You get over it
Speaker 4: interesting that they also had evidence that they cultivated grains.
Speaker 4: How do they determine that? One way was dental carries
Speaker 4: cavities Dental cavities that were caused in a population by
Speaker 4: consumption of starchy plants. Starch is broken down into sugar
Speaker 4: in the mouth by amylade, which is an enzyme found
Speaker 4: in saliva. So if you eat starch without chewing it,
Speaker 4: you don't get as much calories out of it. Don't
Speaker 4: try that, but if you do want to figure it out,
Speaker 4: just take a cracker and chew it until it gets sweet.
Speaker 4: You'll notice it. But the cavities in your teeth, and
Speaker 4: there was a lot of them in this population and
Speaker 4: they hadn't been found in more northernly population. So therefore
Speaker 4: the cavities are probably due to eating a lot of
Speaker 4: starchy plants and creating free floating sugar in your mouth,
Speaker 4: which then inspires bacteria and causes cavities. So that's one
Speaker 4: thing that I learned from this particular thing. But the
Speaker 4: paper was just all over the place as far as factually, So.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, I think the study was was more thorough
Speaker 3: than the actual article. I also got when I look
Speaker 3: at the actual study, and you know, it was focused
Speaker 3: on North Africa and Morocco and the researchers SOT said that,
Speaker 3: as Jonathan mentioned, they used all kinds of tests on
Speaker 3: the teats and kay and all of this in order
Speaker 3: to be able to tell what kind of diet they had,
Speaker 3: but also pointed out that this is just for that area.
Speaker 3: You can't say from this study that all humans on
Speaker 3: that time period eight and mostly Vigian diet or whatever.
Speaker 3: That means that they were trying. The article was trying
Speaker 3: to say that they're going to continue to examine different
Speaker 3: sites because they want to determine if other Late Stone
Speaker 3: Ash civilizations eat a similar diet. This is because our
Speaker 3: previous assumption was that Palalytic humans ate mostly meat, That's
Speaker 3: why they call it the paleodie, and that focuses you know,
Speaker 3: mostly only either like meat healthy fat, nuts, seeds, and
Speaker 3: all of these kind of whole foods.
Speaker 2: Well, I want to stop there.
Speaker 1: I want to stop there and just insert this before
Speaker 1: we move on, because I think it's important to talk
Speaker 1: about the location and to talk about what was going
Speaker 1: on at that time period. So number one, and I
Speaker 1: think most importantly, this author, I think fails to show
Speaker 1: that not all cave people or paleolithic people around thirteen
Speaker 1: thousand BCE, or really at any time period, were all monolithic.
Speaker 1: We're all the same, right. Cave people, Paleolithic people were opportunists,
Speaker 1: and they ate what their environment gave them. They ate
Speaker 1: plants and lesumes if that's what was abundantly available. They
Speaker 1: ate fish if that was what was abundantly available, and
Speaker 1: if it was easier to hunt a take down small
Speaker 1: game or big game. You know, that was the thing
Speaker 1: that they centered their diet on, and it depended where
Speaker 1: you lived and what your capability was going to be
Speaker 1: based on the geography. Now, another thing that we have
Speaker 1: to remember is that thirteen thousand years BCE. I think
Speaker 1: I said years ago. That's not correct, that would be
Speaker 1: about fifteen thousand years ago, but thirteen thousand years BCE.
Speaker 2: You know, the northern Morocco.
Speaker 1: Was not the Sahara of today. It was very lush,
Speaker 1: It was filled with streams and rivers, and there was
Speaker 1: probably a lot of fish. So I don't the thing
Speaker 1: that the author said. He said, well, when people picture caveman,
Speaker 1: they picture them taking down a big prey and roasting
Speaker 1: it over a fire.
Speaker 2: Well that's not necessarily true.
Speaker 1: I picture cavemen in some areas fishing a lot, right
Speaker 1: or you know, finding meat, finding food in other areas
Speaker 1: that are unlike people that are separated from them. So
Speaker 1: all that to say, yes, I think it's very important
Speaker 1: to identify this was a small patch of northern Africa
Speaker 1: thirty thousand years BCE and probably had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with the Mesopotamian cultures of thirteen thousand BCE or that
Speaker 1: of northern Europe. Like you guys pointed out, yeah, Egypt
Speaker 1: right where they could live.
Speaker 4: Many thousands of years later.
Speaker 3: So you know it's like, yeah, yeah, those are great
Speaker 3: points because people were also moving around a lot at
Speaker 3: those times. These civilizations weren't settled until about I think
Speaker 3: it will be like maybe five thousand years later or so,
Speaker 3: when the agricultural revolution started. You know, they started settling
Speaker 3: more and they were able to domesticate animals and you know,
Speaker 3: using their milk and using like all of the more
Speaker 3: animal products. So at the time that these periolithic humans lived,
Speaker 3: it was as you said, very very importantistic. They just
Speaker 3: ate whatever they could cultivate, whether they were in a
Speaker 3: specific spot for like you know, a season, and then
Speaker 3: they moved somewhere else. Whatever, there was a bit amount
Speaker 3: of whatever they were going to start eating. It was
Speaker 3: just as they went.
Speaker 4: They an explanation was there was an explanation of how
Speaker 4: they figured out that they were partially growing cereal foods
Speaker 4: was in a Procedures in the National Academy of Sciences USA,
Speaker 4: issue one to eleven, pages nine fifty four to nine
Speaker 4: fifty nine, and one of the things that says was
Speaker 4: the presence of early evidence linking hybrid This is about
Speaker 4: the cavities, high prevalence of carries to reliance on highly
Speaker 4: caryogenic wild plant foods, and police des hunter gatherers from
Speaker 4: North Africa. This evidence predates other high carries populations and
Speaker 4: the first signs of food production by several thousand years.
Speaker 4: We infer that increased reliance on wild plants, rich infrementable
Speaker 4: carbohydrates caused an early shift towards a disease associated oral
Speaker 4: microboa biota. Which they're saying is that these people, by
Speaker 4: how much damage there was to their teeth, they actually
Speaker 4: probably were doing horticulture, not agriculture. But you know, if
Speaker 4: they found fertile ground, they had seeds, they plant them
Speaker 4: and then when they came back they would use them.
Speaker 4: So there was a lot more of an abundance there.
Speaker 4: And as Jimmy pointed out, thirteen thousand DCE was a
Speaker 4: very wet part. It was, you know, just as the
Speaker 4: ice age were starting to ice was starting to recede,
Speaker 4: and the Sahara where the desert is, was really kind
Speaker 4: of a savannah and in places a kind of jungly,
Speaker 4: so a lot of water and rivers in that going
Speaker 4: through there. It doesn't look like it now, but you
Speaker 4: know what I mean.
Speaker 1: So I thought I highlighted that part too, so, quoting
Speaker 1: the author, the most remarkable aspect of this study is
Speaker 1: the revelation that this population developed ways to cultivate plant
Speaker 1: growth and harvest crops thousands of years before the agricultural
Speaker 1: revolution took place.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't want to that's remarkable.
Speaker 1: I don't want to give this group too much credit though,
Speaker 1: because I think what studies have shown and what I
Speaker 1: think some sources that I've come across just over my
Speaker 1: years in general, is that you know, while they were
Speaker 1: not building civilizations and they were more nomadic, it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that they were leaving for good. I mean they
Speaker 1: would roam the same areas they would have areas they
Speaker 1: would return to. Right, So they may have been nomadic,
Speaker 1: but they still had different hunting grounds, different feeding grounds,
Speaker 1: different places that they would go to to find the
Speaker 1: things that they needed. And probably one of the things
Speaker 1: they figured out was, remember when we ate all of
Speaker 1: those fruit and we left all the seeds or we
Speaker 1: left all that stuff there, weird that fruit just grew here.
Speaker 2: And so they.
Speaker 1: Probably before they turned it into a civilization, yeah, turned
Speaker 1: it into harvesting, turned it into horticulture, but were still
Speaker 1: very much on the move, and so it probably took
Speaker 1: a little while, probably took a population boom for people
Speaker 1: to start settling, because you know, there's only so far
Speaker 1: you can go until you run into other tribes that
Speaker 1: you know, you run into issues. It's like, well, let's
Speaker 1: just settle here and keep doing this thing that we're doing,
Speaker 1: and so that that kind of fed into that h
Speaker 1: that development.
Speaker 2: At least from what I've seen.
Speaker 1: I'm no expert, and I never want to give the
Speaker 1: impression that I am one.
Speaker 4: This is a thousand years after you know, after this
Speaker 4: was Godepe Tepe and those Anatolian settlements, so you know,
Speaker 4: you can see where this is kind of going. You know,
Speaker 4: the people up there were building not in the cities,
Speaker 4: but large settlements, but the people in north North Africa
Speaker 4: were still being hunter gatherers.
Speaker 2: I do want to come back to that.
Speaker 1: I want to come back to go Beckley Tepe because
Speaker 1: you that is a really good point to take me
Speaker 1: to where I want to bring this kind of development
Speaker 1: of civilization. But AJ you picked out this article, you
Speaker 1: thought the vegan topic would be great for this conversation
Speaker 1: because I am the resident vegan at least for tonight.
Speaker 2: So I've been I've been doing a vegan diet for
Speaker 2: four months.
Speaker 1: I'm not really a vegan though, I mean, think about it,
Speaker 1: So I'm a vegan, but I have children that are
Speaker 1: meat eaters that have leather shoes, So I am feeding the.
Speaker 2: Machine that creates that abuses animals.
Speaker 1: If you will I'm not a real vegan, and even
Speaker 1: if these people had a mostly vegan diet, we could
Speaker 1: never consider them vegan, could we?
Speaker 2: And so ag I wanted to get your take on that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel the same way. And that's why, even
Speaker 3: when I've eaten whole foods plant based, I always continue
Speaker 3: to call myself plant based because I don't think that
Speaker 3: I could meet the vegan requirements to qualify I guess,
Speaker 3: so I mostly do it for my health. And when
Speaker 3: I came into the atheist community, I kind of started
Speaker 3: to also think about the animal warfare aspect. I remember
Speaker 3: I had a call with you and Objectively then and
Speaker 3: Forest and actually on the ACA channel the elities experience.
Speaker 3: One thing that I was kind of always thinking about
Speaker 3: was on that call, and it kind of relates to
Speaker 3: this because it speaks to human evolution. Is that a
Speaker 3: lot of people think that humans have evolved to adapt
Speaker 3: to eating meat and that we get, you know, such
Speaker 3: a big significant benefit from it, but there are so
Speaker 3: many other factors that have helped increase or you know,
Speaker 3: body size or strength. You know, we have more processed food,
Speaker 3: we have better healthcare, we have food access in general
Speaker 3: has increased, right, we have more fitness options to work,
Speaker 3: and we can work out and become stronger. We have
Speaker 3: medications that affect our body composition, among other things. So
Speaker 3: we know that humans truly have only been eating meat
Speaker 3: for about two million years, like and modern humans have
Speaker 3: only been a round for less than half a million years.
Speaker 3: And as we just say, domestication of animals started ten
Speaker 3: thousand years ago. The Industrial Revolution was two hundred years ago.
Speaker 3: There is just not enough time for the true definition
Speaker 3: of evolution to have changed our bodies to have become
Speaker 3: accustomed to eating meat. That's right, don't require meat.
Speaker 1: And you know what, so I want to jump in
Speaker 1: here because I have said before, like talking to Dan
Speaker 1: objectively Dan, that is the ACA's own objectively Dan from
Speaker 1: truth wanted and talking then you know, I said something like, well,
Speaker 1: the human body is not designed to eat the kind
Speaker 1: of meat that we eat today, and he's like, well,
Speaker 1: what does that even mean? And I don't think I
Speaker 1: really explained it well, but you know, most scholars on
Speaker 1: this subject will say that, and like we talked about earlier,
Speaker 1: you know, depending on the environment would depend on the
Speaker 1: access to meat and how much you ate it. Some
Speaker 1: people even say that, you know, in some societies, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they had meat, but they strictly kept it for special
Speaker 1: ass you know, religious in the early days of religion developing,
Speaker 1: maybe religious ceremonies or some kind of worship. You know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a hallmark of their diet. Now people might
Speaker 1: eat a bacon cheeseburger every single day. You know, that
Speaker 1: is not what we are designed to do. And that's
Speaker 1: what that's what I mean by that. You know, meat
Speaker 1: is fine if you want to talk about the way
Speaker 1: that humans have evolved, but we have pushed past what
Speaker 1: we are designed to do in so many ways, which
Speaker 1: is why we have so much chronic back pain and
Speaker 1: chronic other kind of pains and illnesses because we're not
Speaker 1: the sedentary people that we've turned into.
Speaker 2: But we've created this life for ourselves.
Speaker 1: So on that note that came from some of these
Speaker 1: settlements we developed that Jonathan, you started talking about go
Speaker 1: Beckley tepee. It's a tongue twister in Anatolia and in
Speaker 1: Eastern Europe and the other the other places like it.
Speaker 1: And I just want to give you a chance, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to give you a chance to expand on
Speaker 1: that a little bit. What is the significance of that
Speaker 1: between the connections that we're making about how Paleolithic people
Speaker 1: lived and and and maybe you know their relationship to
Speaker 1: animal meat, nature, et cetera. I mean, what what's the
Speaker 1: significance there.
Speaker 4: Well, I think the significance is the first thing we
Speaker 4: have to remember is that these are modern humans. They
Speaker 4: had slightly larger brains than we do, but they had
Speaker 4: a lot more sensory sensory processing necessary in their lives.
Speaker 4: So so that's the thing. They're modern humans. They're every
Speaker 4: bit as intelligent as we were are were.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, it depends, it depends on what you're referring to.
Speaker 1: Maybe were might be appropriate.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but yeah, so definitely tech A Tepe and the
Speaker 4: other tepees around it that show fairly large settlements of of,
Speaker 4: you know, a couple thousand people. The significance of that
Speaker 4: is that this is the same area that agriculture started,
Speaker 4: the Anatolian area, and so you can image that we're
Speaker 4: just pushing the date back to where they may not
Speaker 4: have been permanent settlements, and they don't think they were
Speaker 4: at this point, but you're starting to see the seeds
Speaker 4: of permanent settlements. Cities, large cities like these were what
Speaker 4: they're finding now we wouldn't consider them large, we would
Speaker 4: consider them a hamlet. But for that time, having that
Speaker 4: many people feeding off the same few square miles is
Speaker 4: a big accomplishment. So, you know, this is pretty interesting
Speaker 4: in a lot of ways. I'm looking forward to when
Speaker 4: the rest of the anthropology and that comes out on
Speaker 4: it and how much they find out about this, because
Speaker 4: it's going to say a lot about what our ancestors
Speaker 4: and civilization itself became and started from.
Speaker 2: So go Beckley Teppe.
Speaker 1: From what I understand, only about five percent of it
Speaker 1: has been excavated. And what people think is that while
Speaker 1: it may not have been a permanent settlement in the
Speaker 1: way that we think about it, they actually do think
Speaker 1: that ultiple tribes, multiple societies in that area use that site,
Speaker 1: worked together on that site to build some kind of
Speaker 1: ritual area or trading post, and it might not.
Speaker 2: Have belonged to only one person.
Speaker 1: But these societies, these early societies, or these early settlements,
Speaker 1: can represent maybe the first kind of international relations, if
Speaker 1: you will, the first uh, the first the first.
Speaker 2: Yeah, interconnected society.
Speaker 1: And that is where I wanted to tie it to
Speaker 1: because this is the atheist community of allten uh.
Speaker 2: We like to talk about religious issues.
Speaker 1: And therefore, when we go back through this whole conversation
Speaker 1: that we've just had and we look at early humans
Speaker 1: figuring out that they can cultivate crops and then later saying, well,
Speaker 1: why don't we just stay here? And then we start
Speaker 1: to see settlements developed. That is where religion actually starts
Speaker 1: to really take form. Not to say that the foraging
Speaker 1: societies didn't have their own religions, but in the development
Speaker 1: of these societies, these settlements that relied on rain water,
Speaker 1: you might see them adhering to worship of a storm
Speaker 1: god like I don't know, yahweh, like l like so
Speaker 1: many other storm gods that were over these societies that
Speaker 1: needed these storms in order to grow their crops and
Speaker 1: feed their animals. And unlike the societies at the longitudinal
Speaker 1: lines or in the beneficial areas, if you will, where
Speaker 1: rivers overflooded, well, they had a steady supply of water, right,
Speaker 1: so they didn't worship or storm god.
Speaker 2: They might have worshiped the god of the sky or
Speaker 2: the god of the moon or something different.
Speaker 1: And anyway, you know, the way that the way that
Speaker 1: we settled and the way that we built our settlements,
Speaker 1: the way that we kind of determined what we needed
Speaker 1: created the gods, right, And I think that is such
Speaker 1: a fascinating story.
Speaker 2: And I don't want to take up take up.
Speaker 1: The space for the end of this segment by just
Speaker 1: kind of blabbering on about my fascination with this time period.
Speaker 1: So I'll give you guys a minute each to close out,
Speaker 1: and then we could call it good for this week.
Speaker 2: Jonathan, I'll start with you.
Speaker 4: I think that as we find the initial points where
Speaker 4: different clans got together and different organizations got together to
Speaker 4: start creating society and start religious activities, I find it
Speaker 4: fascinating and I'm really looking forward to all the research
Speaker 4: that comes out of it when they start excavating the
Speaker 4: rest of these sites, and including the ones in North Africa,
Speaker 4: to show how we evolved into what our societies evolved
Speaker 4: into what they are now.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm proud to be human, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: I get, well, you know what, I get so sucked into.
Speaker 1: I know, I'm sometimes really disappointed to be human being, Okay,
Speaker 1: but I really get I really envy the people that
Speaker 1: came before us. They had it tough, they had it tough,
Speaker 1: and they managed to survive anyway, AJ please close us out.
Speaker 3: I don't have anything deep like you guys to say,
Speaker 3: but I'm going to say that if there's anything that
Speaker 3: these article should have taught us is rather than that
Speaker 3: they were vegan or whatever they said, is that this
Speaker 3: threw off the whole paleo diet because the main aspect
Speaker 3: of the palaeo diet is not to eat quins, and
Speaker 3: we just found out that they ate quins.
Speaker 1: So yeah, good point. I mean, our new understanding of
Speaker 1: the paleo diet right. And again, even if they ate
Speaker 1: largely plant based, they couldn't have been vegan. They were
Speaker 1: making clothes out of hides and weapons out of bones,
Speaker 1: and so you know, catchy, catchy article titled nice try,
Speaker 1: nice try, but you.
Speaker 2: Haven't told us anyway.
Speaker 1: The reason the reason I love being a host that
Speaker 1: the ACA is the wide array of things that we
Speaker 1: can cover and getting into early human history.
Speaker 2: Is something that I'm passionate about.
Speaker 1: And I could tell that you guys are as well,
Speaker 1: and I just I really thank you for joining. I
Speaker 1: really appreciate this conversation tonight. And that's going to do
Speaker 1: it for this week. So everybody, thank you for tuning
Speaker 1: in and