Evolution Matters on PaleoJays Smoothie Cafe

One of the hallmarks of the ancestral, or paleo lifetstyle, is its reliance on the observance of EVOLUTION determining virtually everything about us!

We are evolved human beings, after all.  Our diet evolved from our interaction with our environment on this earth, as did our patterns of healthy living, and interaction with others.  Each of our selves is the culmination of millenia of years, during which our own DNA has existed, evolving in response to the environments in which our ancestors have found themselves in for all of that vast stretch of time.

Those of us who came from the far north of Europe, back in the ice ages, developed as humans under very different conditions to those experienced in other areas of the world.  And so, the Danes of today resemble the Congo pygmies in very little indeed!  

Some humans lived in hot climes, such as Africa- under conditions of constant warfare and tribal fighting over readily available hunting and gathering conditions.  There was very little incentive to develope any sort of technology, or cooperation- immediate success, meaning your tribe got the animal or the patch of fruit or plantains- well, that was all that mattered.  It was time to go home and breed!

Similarly, when children were born into such an environment, there was very little reason to nurture them much beyond infancy.  Most children died young anyway, and so to overly invest much in them then was wasted effort.  Disease is rampant in warm, tropical climates.  The best evolutionary strategy there seemed to be to breed large broods of children, invest little in their nurture, and only concentrate on those that survived into maturity.  This was best for the tribe, at least back then.

And, there was very little reason to plan for the future: Winter did not exist, and so all days were very much the same!  Food was plentiful, always; the important thing was to make sure that you and your tribe got most of it!  Then, you could once again concentrate on your raison detre- breeding.

This was a successful strategy, except for disease.  It was constant in Africa especially, and kept the numbers of the humans there quite small.  As did their constant warfare amongst themselves, which to be fair was evolutionarily- there in Africa- quite appropriate.  Physical development of fast twitch muscle fibers, running ability, and the evolution of an explosive violence when opposed was effective in that time and place.

There was even no need to look for new developments.  In Africa, the wheel, animal herding, and even a building of more than one story were never developed, much less more advanced technologies.

However, meanwhile far north of Africa in Europe, those humans who were evolving there, (whether they originally left Africa or came from another place altogether: this is still unknown)- these peoples were facing an Ice Age.  A frigid time, when the climate was increasingly inhospitable to humans, and was really dominated by much larger animals such as the wooly mammoth and the auroch, which was the ancestor of the modern cow and bison.

Vegetation was minimal, and hard to coax from the ground in this period.  The ancient Europeans concentrated then on animals, ruminants like the woolly mammoth and others that could convert grain during the short summers into meat.  This meat could feed a tribe for weeks, if not months, although to hunt such daunting animals was very difficult.

These ancient peoples, who adapted and evolved to their own harsh environment by actually developing a pale skin and eyes (probably by admixing with Neanderthals), were able to convert sunlight into vitamin D through their skin, ensuring their

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