Abstract

This study goes deeply through the nutrition of the first primate and analyses the nutrition in the line of human evolution. Simply dividing the shifts in the nutrition through the human evolution, it is obvious that some elements in the diet are more important than the others. Since the beginning of the Neolithic, the ratio of plant-to-animal foods in the diet has sharply increased from an average of probably 65% to 35% during Paleolithic times to as high as 90% to 10% since the advent of agriculture. The changes in diet from hunter-gatherer times to agricultural times have been almost all detrimental, although there is some evidence indicating that at least some genetic adaptation to the Neolithic has begun taking place in the approximately 10,000 years since it began. With the much heavier reliance on starchy foods that became the staples of the diet, tooth decay, malnutrition, and rates of infectious disease increased dramatically over Paleolithic times, further exacerbated by crowding leading to even higher rates of communicable infections. This evidences shows that the immune system of human beings became weaker and many metabolic diseases including cancer has become epidemic. The height of humans has decreased in the agricultural revolution as well.

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