It Was the End of the World as We Knew It

How old is the zoo? Many others claim or insinuate that Homo sapiens left our true nature behind with the advent of agriculture. I don’t think that this is totally accurate. In some ways our ability to control, or perhaps better stated, our unprecedented attempts to manipulate our environment are innately human. So while it is tempting to link the beginning of agriculture to the end of humanity in the wild, it is probably more accurate to say that the zoo is as old as our species. That statement may seem counterintuitive to the whole idea of a Paleolithic principle, but it is important to remember that almost all creatures interact with their surroundings and make changes. Bears dig dens, birds build nests, and farmer ants, well, farm.

What I am concerned with most when I think Paleo thoughts is not when did we begin altering our habitat, like say selecting for certain plants, but when did those alterations cease being beneficial in the long-term and why do we still cling to them? As I wrote in a previous post, I no longer see the practice of agriculture as some sort of choice our ancestors made but more of an accidental course of action embarked upon by necessity. Now I like to think of at least commodity agriculture as a wobbly stepping stone that kept us alive long enough to find a better way to sustain our existence.

So in my understanding, the zoo is as old as humanity and not the product of the beginning of agriculture, but somewhere along the way things went awry with zoo management. That is to say that I see agriculture and other detrimental Neolithic structures as effects, not the causes. Furthermore, if I want to understand life in the zoo, before the caretakers seemed to go a little crazy, it is probably important to understand what caused said craziness.

Somewhere around 12,000 years ago, the Pleistocene epoch came to an end. Its passing was marked by the disappearance of what is called mega fauna throughout most of the world. Mega fauna were large, often herbivorous, animals that roamed the many grasslands around the globe at the time. What exactly caused this disappearance is still the subject of some debate. I believe it was largely due to an invasive species, Homo sapiens, because as others have pointed out, the climate variations that are sometimes blamed for the extinctions of this time had been routine throughout the epoch. I speculate that the removal of these large creatures was what threw the zoo into turmoil. A turmoil out of which we are still working.

If one believes, as I do, that the world as we knew it came to an end with the Pleistocene, every living arrangement that humanity has devised since then is suspect. I know this will be an unpopular idea among many in the Paleosphere who want to look at the remaining hunter-gatherer tribes as a model for what the life of our ancestors was like. The truth is we can probably not deduce much about the lives of pre-historic humans from the surviving hunter-gatherers. Rather, as Jared Diamond suggests in his latest book, we can see them as experiments in organizing human society.

One mistake that I feel some Paleo bloggers make with some regularity is trying to search for information about a good human diet by studying what these people with a more primitive lifestyle are eating. I have a friend who once told me that he hoped we soon find a way to clone mammoths. When I inquired as to why, he informed me that he believed that they must be extremely tasty because we chased them into extinction! While this may seem silly, it still makes a lot of sense in some ways. Some detractors of the Paleo diet often point out that current “game” animals do not provide the high levels of fat that followers of the diet claim would have been normal during our evolution. While the argument has been countered by including the high fat content of some organ meats, I ask this question, how much saturated fat is on a mammoth? I tried to find some nutritional information on elephant meat because I think it might give some indication as to what one might expect from a mammoth or mastodon, but I was unsuccessful. If anyone out there has that data, I would be very interested to see it.

If we cannot rely on any recorded models to try to understand how our ancestors lived, then how do we decide what is Paleo and what is not and how do we build a better zoo? Paleoanthropology is a field I find amazingly interesting. but it will probably find more questions than it can answer. Ultimately I believe the best way to understand our past is by studying our current biology and psychology, then applying what I call a Paleo filter.

For instance, if you told me that table sugar was an excellent food source for humans, I could look at our biology and say that doesn’t seem right. Then I run it through the Paleo filter: did prehistoric humans and their evolutionary predecessors have access to table sugar. No! So this claim can be dismissed as nonsense. This is a very simplified example, but I think it helps get the point across.

The same thing is true for things more psychological in nature. For example, if someone asserted that it was unhealthy for adolescent boys to see women’s breasts, I could point out that there is no real evidence for this and then ask if there is any chance that young men in the Pleistocene ever went more than a few hours between viewing breasts. I think we all can figure out the answer to that one.

I started this blog because I feel that the diet is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to things that a Paleolithic view can help teach us. It is important that we keep in mind as we go about our education that the world to which even the most ancient societies still around today are adapted differs greatly from the one in which humanity was raised up. So you will find that I don’t care if tribes around the world eat lots of starch, or are extremely peaceful or warlike. Instead I want to use the tools of science to gain a better understanding of how we can best serve ourselves. The book of Paleo is written in our DNA, our anatomy, our neurons, our chemical pathways, and our emotions. Now we just have to learn how to read.