This should clue us to rephrase the question. It should be “Were there cavemen with traits that would make them fat today?”
Seems to me that a craving to eat high-energy-content animal fat well beyond satiation would be a survival trait–you never could know when your next meal would come.
Having evolved a craving to stuff one’s face with high-calorie foods thus becomes actively unhealthy when Krustyburgers and big bags of chips and tubs of ice cream are easily available.
I agree with mipsman about the “Venus” statues – the first thing I thought of when I saw the title of this thread. Their very existence argues that at least some women did manage to achieve a good layer of fat. To those who say that these figures are “obviously” idealizations, I reply that the fat is realistically distributed on those figures – they are modelled after real-life people. And if there can be obese women, there can also be obese men. I grant that most people probably were not fat, but that doesn’t preclude the existence of a few portly individuals.
I read that Ötzi Iceman had cardiovascular disease, heart and arteries clogged with cholesterol. Chowing down all that meat . . . so much for the “Neolithic Diet.”
One thing the proponents of the “Neolithic Diet” forgot to add was the custom among early Homo of bashing the skulls and eating the brains of other humans. As noted in Clan of the Cave Bear.
[The most vocal proponent of the no-carb diets is a gentleman who ways approximately 300 pounds. You do the math, people. ] -Chronos
WHAT???
WHO are you talking about???
WHERE did you here that the ‘most’ vocal proponent of no-carb (assume low carb never heard of a no carb diet) was a 300 lb man???
There are many proponents of various low-carb diets, I never heard of one single proponent - probally because there are so many low carb diets - some of which are NOT low carb - they are just lower the the food pyrmid recomended low carb levels
I don’t remember the name, but I saw him on a TV show pushing his books. Since I’ve never seen any other proponents of such diets on TV shows, I assumed that meant that he was more vocal than any others. I’m estimating the weight, but he had to be close to 300.
As for the diet itself, this was NO carbs, not just low. I know that that’s insane, but apparently, there’s enough suckers out there who don’t know that for the books to sell.
Everyone in this thread is using the word caveman, when they should probably be using the term hunter-gatherers (HG). But that’s a side issue.
HGs come in two flavors, regular and affluent. Regular ones have no castes, their leaders are people who are influential because of their personalities. But those leaders get no special bennies for being leader; they have to hunt and gather just like everyone else. No one gathers food to give to the leaders.
Affluent hunter-gatherers live in areas that are resource rich. They can collect all the food they need without having to move around a lot, so they’ve become sedentary. They will have a permanent home, although during certain times of the year they may move to a different locale to harvest a food source (salmon are running in a nearby river, for example). Because they are sedentary, they can accumulate goods, wage warfare, and develop castes just like farming communities do. So they may have slaves (captured in war), commoners and the elite. The slavery found in this type of society is probably the only way you will have people gathering lots of food for the leaders in an HG society.
No body knows exactly how this statuette should be interpreted. Is it a goddess symbol? An idealized woman? Something left over from a magical rite? Just an art image? The depiction of fat distribution on the body is fairly accurate so it’s a good guess to say it’s an accurate image of an obese person but beyond that is speculation.
People in hunter/gatherer socieites tend to be on the slim side because walking is the best form of exercise. It’s how we evolved as scavengers. How did you get food? You went around walking, looking for it or hunting it.
Also, noting what present day H/G societies eat and working backwards, we can make a good guess that their diet was 1/3 meat to 2/3s fruits and veggies. Dairy products wouldn’t have showed up 'til you domesicated herd animals. Grains and grain products wouldn’t have appeared until you had agriculture (roughly around 4-3 thousand BCE, depending on which part of the world).
Sorry, that’s all I can remember from my Anthro classes right now. Again, I’m at work and don’t have access to my library.
Right. I had a duo of anthro teachers back in college who were furious over the neopagans saying that it was a religious icon, proof of goddess worship, etc. My favorite altervnative theory that the profs gave: porn. In the dark of night, our primitive Hef could feel up the exceedingly well endowed statuette to facilitate his, um, recreation.
Two things interesting to note:
Most of the food of HG societies is gathered by the women. The men (hunters) do comparatively little.
Skeletal remains reveal that the onset of agriculture and a high-grain diet is directly correlated with a simultaneous decline in lifespan, height, general health, and dental health. Man does not live by bread alone.