Day 41

Today I am on my own mission. On one of the articles I replied to, another member asked me why do people today live so much longer than in the Paleolithic times. I did some research to give him a factual answer, and what I found was VERY interesting indeed.

First of, we claim to try to eat like ancient man did, eating real foods. Basically, we are trying to do a variation of the Late Paleolithic times, i.e., roughly 50/50 plant/animal diet--according to latest figures available elsewhere. This was during the hunter/gatherer era approximately 30,000 to 9,000 BC.

After the Late Paleolithic period, man went through the Mesolithic period, followed by the Neolithic period, and then the Early Bronze period, which lasted from around 3,000 to 2,000 BC. The Mesolithic period was a transition period from Paleolithic to some agricultural products. During the Early Neolithic period, agriculture first spread widely: As diet became more agricultural, it also became more vegetarian in character--relatively much less meat at roughly 10% of the diet, and much more plant food, much of which was grain-based. During the Late Neolithic period, this transition was mostly complete.

At 9,000 BC (the end of the Late Paleolithic period), the average height of a normal man was 177.1 cm, and an average woman was 166.5 cm. At the start of the Early Bronze period, around 3,000 BC, the average heights were 166.3 cm for men and 152.9 cm for women. This was a loss of almost 11 cm for men in height, and over 3 cm for women, all in a period of 6,000 years.

But loss of height was not the worst. Pelvic inlet depth also changed. Why is this important? Pelvic inlet depth is a measure of the size of the pelvic canal through which a baby would pass during birth. It can be measured in men and women, but obviously its implications for birth only apply to women. Pelvic inlet depth declined quite a bit with the adoption of agriculture, and still have not reached paleolithic levels to this day. The Pelvic Inlet Depth is stated as a %, and the higher it is, the better. At 9,000 BC, it was at 97.7%, and at 3,000 BC it was 75.6%. It has gone up again, but now is on average at 92.1%. This is the single most important reason why so many women today suffer during childbirth, and why so many caesarians have to be performed. Here's an exerpt from Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price:

A similar impressive comment was made to me by Dr. Romig, the superintendent of the government hospital for Eskimos and Indians at Anchorage, Alaska. He stated that in his thirty-six years among the Eskimos, he had never been able to arrive in time to see a normal birth by a primitive Eskimo woman. But conditions have changed materially with the new generation of Eskimo girls, born after their parents began to use foods of modern civilization. Many of them are carried to his hospital after they had been in labor for several days. One Eskimo woman who had married twice, her last husband being a white man, reported to Dr. Romig and myself that she had given birth to twenty-six children and that several of them had been born during the night and that she had not bothered to waken her husband, but had introduced him to the new baby in the morning.

Finally, for those who do not believe grains have an adverse effect on the human skeletal structure, all I can say is this. The idea that a grain-based diet interferes with normal skeletal development isn't new at all. It is well-accepted in the field of archaeology that the adoption of grains coincided with a shortening of stature, thinner bones and crooked, cavity-ridden teeth. This fact is so well accepted that these sorts of skeletal changes are sometimes used as evidence that grains were adopted in a particular region historically.