| Happy Sunday, everyone. An interesting study came out that shows exactly what we're always talking about in the Primal/ancestral community. The stated purpose of the study was not to prove, let alone discuss any Primal health concepts. It was an ancient DNA study looking at skeletons from a farming community in Neolithic Germany. Here's why I found it so interesting: As the regular story goes, Europe was populated by hunter-gatherers up until about 10,000 years ago, when Neolithic farmers from the Near East/modern day Turkey began migrating west into Europe. These farmers sometimes interbred with the resident HGs but usually stayed genetically separate. There was conflict. There were mass killings and war, on both sides. But both groups survived largely as separate, genetically distinct groups. These "farmers" didn't look like farmers, genetically. They were a mix of farmer and hunter-gatherer stock, with between 37-58% hunter-gatherer ancestry. Furthermore, this inter-breeding occurred recently—about 300-500 years prior to the time of death. They were living as farmers but weren't really suited for it. They didn't have the genes for carbohydrate consumption. They weren't carrying many amylase copies; amylase genes code for the enzyme that digests carbohydrates. Populations with many amylase copies are better at digesting carbohydrates. They were lactose intolerant. Even though they had milk-producing livestock, they couldn't digest lactose. They had darker skin; without the high level of animal foods common in the hunter-gatherer diet to which they were arguably adapted, they would have had trouble getting enough vitamin D.
Sure enough, their skeletons showed evidence of bone lesions, severe malnutrition and physical stress. A few hundred years later, these hybrid farmers would have encountered the dairy-eating, cattle-herding, physically robust steppe nomads moving in from Eastern Europe. The nomads were eating a high-animal food diet, full of the micronutrients their genes expected. They would have been taller, stronger, more effective overall. They were eating a diet to which they were adapted. And sure enough, the nomads largely displaced and defeated the farmers they met. There's a lesson in there. Some people like to make the claim that our ancestral diets don't matter because we're "always evolving." Sure, those "farmers" were "on their way" to adapting to the agricultural diet. Maybe they would have made it in another thousand years or two. I don't disagree. Adaptation is a spectrum, not a binary matter. But the fact remains that they hadn't "evolved enough" to handle that diet. And a few hundred years later when the nomads swept through, the farmers lost. It's important to eat, move, and live right for your genes. For you. Not "the human race." What works for you? That's all that matters. What do you think, folks? Should we be eating junk food so that our future descendants can have an easier time choking down seed oil and sugar? Is that even how it works? Let me know in the comment section of Weekly Link Love. | 
