What, This Old Thing?  It’s a Million Years Old or Why You Should Blame the Caveman if You Can’t Zip Your Jeans

By Alisa Singer

If you pride yourself on your late model car or your trendy clothes, you’ll be surprised to learn that you’re walking around in a body designed over a million years ago. This is around the time the Homo Erectus model was first introduced. The very latest body style, Homo Sapiens, was released by the manufacturer approximately 40,000 years ago. Almost no aspect of civilization since then has even made a dent in our genetic design. You see, this evolution business is rather slow going, requiring tens of thousands of generations for any observable mutation to occur.  So fruit flies (with a generation of only 9 days) evolve 852 times more quickly than humans.

The point is your body thinks it’s still back in the Pleistocene epoch. Imagine its surprise and disappointment to find itself planted in front of a computer 8 hours a day instead of romping through the jungle chasing (or being chased by) saber-toothed tigers. This dismay and confusion is sometimes expressed in the form of Type 2 diabetes and coronary artery disease.

In contrast, Google up the phrase “prehistoric man and South Beach diet” and you’ll find no direct hits ~ zilch.  This research methodology has led scientists to conclude that obesity was not present among our prehistoric ancestors. This makes sense given the dramatic differences in our lifestyles.

With regard to the pursuit of food, for example, it appears that before we became hunters and gatherers we were that less enterprising predator ~ the scavenger.  Now that doesn’t sound like a terribly demanding workout ~ wandering listlessly through alleys, sifting through trash.  Many of us forage through the contents of our fridges at 2:00 a.m. without breaking a sweat.  But as we evolved into hunters and gatherers, our exercise routines were definitely kicked up a notch or two.

Hunting, as practiced by cavemen, could be quite demanding.  It involved setting one’s alarm for an ungodly hour and taking long walks through the forest on unpaved roads in bare feet. Also, cavemen tended to throw heavy stones and long sharp spears (think shotput and javelins). And then there was the intensely aerobic aspect of the activity which occurred when it turned out the large (but surprisingly agile for his 6 tons) Mastodon had become highly irritated by the barrage of stones and spears, instead of highly dead.

Now, gathering is something I haven’t done much of but I feel like this activity involves a lot of bending over, crouching and almost certainly squatting. Picture it ~ squat for a berry, get up, squat for a nut, get up…repeat a thousand times a day.   (That’s a lot of reps.) In contrast, today’s equivalent of exerting oneself for a meal means opting for carryout instead of delivery, or bothering to put the leftovers in the microwave instead of eating them cold.

In terms of dietary differences, what we know about the eating habits of our ice age ancestor is that he favored raw meat but wasn’t very picky, i.e., an “opportunistic carnivore”, willing to dine on insects if convenient.  He also enjoyed leafy plants, vegetables, fruits, nuts, roots, and apparently derived his carbs from “tubers”. (In case you don’t know what these are, Wikipedia defines these as “plant underground storage organs”.  Hope that clears things up for you.)

Moreover, early humans lacked gastronomical temptations of the kind we face today.  Thus it’s hard to imagine this conversation between Wilma and Betty:  “I just hate myself – last night I polished off a ton of roots and tubers, and after that I binged on a half-carcass of Giant Wildebeest.” One wonders what would have become of our species if Pliocene man had been exposed to such mouth-watering delectables as double bacon cheeseburgers, deep dish stuffed pizza and caramel pecan Cinnabons. Would he have steadfastly resisted, preferring termites and plant underground storage organs, or become a pizzavore like the rest of us? My money’s on succumbing – after all he was only (mostly) human. And what would have happened next? (I mean after he erased all those pictures of bison on his cave walls and replaced them with triple whoppers and DQ Oreo blizzards.

Well, one possibility, certainly, is that our species would have become extinct long before the invention of Weight Watchers.  But there is also the undeniable chance that over the course of tens of thousands of generations we might have developed a super metabolism, capable of burning 20,000 plus calories a day. Our doctors would be prescribing fettucine alfredo, hot fudge sundaes, and pills to increase our cholesterol; scurvy would be defined as the lack of sufficient butter and whipped cream in the diet.

Think how much further along the evolutionary path we’d be if Homo Erectus had the foresight 500,000 years ago to invent cheese fries and polish sausage instead of fire. Perhaps not what Darwin had in mind when he coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” but, oh, so much better.

In a way it’s rather too bad we aren’t fruit flies.  You hardly ever see a fat fruit fly.

You, too, can be as svelte as a Neanderthal. Here’s a diet and exercise routine based on the habits of our cave-dwelling ancestors:

Breakfast – eggs of extinct birds, scrambled; fruits and berries

Lunch  – flesh of Giant Ground Sloth; termites; side of carrion. (Tip: for flavorful leftovers mash up extra meat with a large stone and sprinkle with assorted insects)

Snack – small fried rodent; nuts and sedge grass

Dinner – leafy plant salad; brains of Woolly Rhino; roots; kidneys of cave dweller living next door (if he happens to be slower than you)

Complementary workout – vigorously chase your pet around the living room hurling small stones and sticks; throw a hundred or so pennies on the floor and squat to pick up each coin individually

Alisa Singer’s humorous essays have appeared in a variety of print and online newspapers and magazines across the country and in Canada. She is the author of the books I Still Wanna Be A…,  an illustrated collection of whimsical poetic fantasies in which she “morphs” herself into her childhood heroes, and My Baby Boomer Memory Album,  an album to memorialize the first grand child, social security check, chin hair and other milestones of the second half of the boomer’s life. You can learn more about her work by visiting her website: www.AlisaSinger.com or contacting her at ASingerAuthor@gmail.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 29th, 2010 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Vol.18. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.