Since I first heard about “Paleodiets,” I’ve been leery of them. For one thing, it’s clear that there was no such thing as an overall “Cave Man” diet, but that instead, people ate lots of different stuff depending on where they lived. People who lived at higher latitudes 10,000 years ago would not have had nearly as much fruit as those in the tropics, who themselves could have gone for long periods without bothering to hunt and kill an animal.
Anyway, a recent discussion of this subject with another person brought out the idea that “Paleodiets” aren’t supposedly trying to “match” what was eaten by any particular people 10,000 years ago (pre-argriculture), but just getting rid of processed grains and sugars. I can buy that, as it makes more sense.
However, I also read a Scientific American item a year or two ago about a man who’d done some research which showed that one person using easily-made hand tools (a woven grass basket, I believe) could gather enough wild grains in a day to feed a family of four for a week (or something along those lines).
Which brings me to my question (since Google is refusing to be my friend on this matter): what is the oldest quern (or other grain-grinding tool) that’s ever been found? How much farther back does it date from the “invention” of farming grasses on purpose, instead of grinding up collected wild grains?
Wow, I see what you mean about Google not being your friend on this–it keeps asking me, “Did you mean earliest quran?” and then forwarding me. :rolleyes:
Anyway, off hand I can’t find a reference or a link that says, “This is the earliest saddle quern ever found.” The closest I can get to an actual date would be about 6000 B.C., in China, looks like. It’s generally a “Mesolithic” thing, and Mesolithic can be anything from from 10,000 B.C. to 3000 B.C., depending on the geographic area, and which archaeologist you’re talking to.
I also can’t find anything offhand that tells whether people started using querns on wild grasses before they started cultivating grains, sorry. But common sense would seem to indicate that people probably started mashing up wild seeds in between two stones before they started growing their own grain.
Thanks, Ultrafilter. Unfortunately, a Google for “quern site:beyondveg.com” turned up nothing. I would expect 'em to mention querns in any discussion of paleolithic grain processing.
Ah, okay. Instead, it turns out that Loren Cordain just doesn’t use the word quern, but instead calls 'em grinding stones (which makes Googling for the earliest one even more difficult), and gives a reference for a 5,000-year use of them prior to domestication of grains (in the Middle East), 10,000 years ago (13,000 BCE, in other words).
I’m still not sure I can buy into the whole theory, though. Especially when the age of onset for many of the mentioned diseases of a “modern diet” is usually well past reproductive age (and thus wouldn’t be much of a selective pressure, anyway). With any luck, some article there addresses this issue, but I’m still somewhat wary.
DDG, thanks for trying. I’ll bet you looked at a lot of the same sites I did. As for my own searching, although I learned of when bread came to Scotland (don’t remember the search terms for that one), that bit of trivia isn’t really germane.
Aborigines were certainly using grinding stones and harvesting starchy grains and nuts for many tens of thousands of years before foreigners intorduced agriculture to the continent. The concept of a stone age diet without grains and nuts seems to lack any factual basis.
Thanks for that, Blake. It’s odd that that comes from Australia, since Cordain and others who research this kind of stuff (especially the Syndrome X connection with diet) tend to do lots of studies with Aboriginies. The start-feeing-them-a-“Western”-diet business, after which they supposedly drop like flies from diabetes, heart attacks, and high blood pressure. Due, supposedly, to all the excess simple carbs they get from sugar and refined grains, which they supposedly don’t normally eat.
Given what I’ve read from Cordain, though, I’m betting (playing Devil’s Advocate here) the answer to that ancient quern is, “well, so? A few people lived with grain in their diets 20,000 years longer than most others. That doesn’t invalidate our research.”
Except it might if it could be shown that while the Aboriginies don’t eat grains now, they did for 298 centuries, or right up until colonization of the continent. Something like that. The theory would (apparently) say that they should be better adapted to that kind of diet, not worse.
Not wanting to get into a debate here, but I suspect a sedentary western lifestyle, social disintegration, illiteracy and high levels of unemployment play a pretty big role in that as well. The same problems faced by indigenous people all over the world.
Sure, sure! I think those things are contributory, as well, which is why I’m not a big fan of Cordain’s theories. They appear, to me, to be too simple to explain all the data available. It’s just tough to get a good grip on what, exactly, is wrong with them. A 30,000-year-old quern is less abstract than anything else I’ve seen or thought of to date, but easily explained away given what Cordain’s already written.
I can’t see how anyone could say, without extensive qualifiers, that a neolithic diet would be better for a modern human than a modern diet is today.
We grow taller, live longer than at any previous time in recorded history.
Add to this, that there are plenty of natural components of a diet which could be harmful, and lots of ‘unnatural’ additives that prevent food deterioration and so reduce the chances of food poisoning that blanket statements about ancient and modern diet are unlikely to be appropriate.
It’s based on the misconception that people somehow lived better and healthier before the advances in food production which led to civilization. It’s a hippy fantasy.