SLEEP : Why is it so important for us? (Part 10)

Ice Age. Anyone watched that nice little animated motion picture? Kids loved it and I think it's nice and mildly hillarious too. Today, I will write abit about Ice Age, how we evolved and survived, as well as farming, how both associate with our circadian rhythm. 

For the last few hundred thousand years or so, our family of man (ancestors @ caveman), hunted for protein in the form of fish, animals, nuts and insects, and gathered fruits, edible roots, bark and weeds in season during the dormant period we call winter. For much of that time, climatic conditions were slowly chilling the planet and a lot of its inhibitants into a many millennia long deep freeze that rendered vast amount of vegetation permanently out of season. 

If we hadn't already had fire, we wouldn't have made it either. The most recent of these 100000 year long cyclical glacial periods ended about 10000 years ago. This last Ice Age buried most of the continental Europe and North America, in a layer of solid ice that was in some places almost three miles deep. We humans, didn't experience any of the previous ages of ice, because we hadn't move north until the last one.

The ice will come again. It will crush cities and suck up the seas. But we will survive, as out ancestors survived. The ice will always come again until the end of the earth's time in the universe because its arrival is timed by our trip around the sun and the angle at which we travel. The less sun up north at the poles, the more ice, the more reflective ice surface, the more the sunlight is reflected away from the earth, meaning less sun, and more ice, and so on. 

These Ice Age centuries changed our metabolism permenantly. During very short, not terribly warm summers, we scored enough carbohydrates to barely get by. Those who were exquisitely light sensitive and had great storage potential lived, and we their children. Now, these traits are a death sentence.

Had a paleolithic man not eaten a predominantly protein and fat diet for the better portion of each year, it would mean that he would have had to go without food for thousands of years at a time. Sorry vegans, but that's not very likely. 

Those thousands of years of heavy protein and fat intake directly increased brain weight, which fostered the evolutionary neural expansion we've cited. For all human time, mean lived and thrived on a diet compromised of eighty to ninety percent protein and its attendant fat content at least seven or eight months out of the whole year, and the rest of the time on vegetation only in season.

Their skeletal remains also testify to their diet. By studying the skeletal remains from the late paleolithic period and analyzing the attributes of recent hunter gatherer groups, it's possible to develop a detailed anatomical and to some extent a biochemical profile. With as little as one limb bone and a formula which relates overall height to limb-bone length, the stature of early man has been deduced. Eastern Mediterranean males stood an estimated average 5'10", but the Leakey-Walker fossils indicate more like an average of 6'2". 

These people attained heights comparable to or greater than those reached by today's 'well-nourished' populations. Bear in mind, these skeletal remains also reflect strength and muscularity, the size of joints and sites where muscles are inserted into bones indicate these people's mass and the amount of of force they were able to exert. The average Cro-Magnon was easily as strong as today's superior male and female athletes. They worked many fewer hours than the coming Agriculturists, but were significantly more robust.

Even 50000 years ago, the hominid Homo Sapiens was biologically indistinguishable from us. If he were wearing a hat and sunglasses, you couldn't pick him out in a lineup. Culturally and socially, the same traits that kept them alive keep us alive today. 

Anthropologists and forensic experts who re-create actual faces from fossilized jaws and skull parts say Cro-Magnon faces were completely modern. Although people living between 40000 and 10000 years ago had not altered the natural world around them to continue their existence for one million generations. It was only 10000 really short years ago, give or take a millennium, that we become capable of controlling the interactive earth given food supply that assured our survival. 

Until this last century, from that distant point ten millenia ago, example, during our entire prehistoric existence, we could eat only the carbohydrates that we could steal and tame from the planet's cornucopia (see below pic). What that means is we've eaten the same kinds of 'natural' carbohydrates for the last 9900 years, and the same amounts. Well, not anymore my friend. No other species has ever had unlimited access of carbohydrates energy without regard for effort, season, competition, and natural disaster. Guess what, farming forever altered the balance of nature.

If we were in trouble before, from that moment on, we were in serious danger. The coming of agriculture 10000 years ago as a viable alternative to hunting and gathering effectively ended the paleolithic period and pretty much eliminated the hunter-gatherer lifestyle worldwide. In reality, the sudden abundance possible when the food supply became controlled by the consumer also provided enough calories to further support the changing patterns of reproduction. 

Now, after we learned to grow crops and foods outside the door, we stopped moving as much. Instead of following the herds to eat what we needed, we started to store the increasingly tame grains and fruits and meat. In the old days, one hunter could support himself and one pregnant woman and maybe two children and even an aged parent. Pregnant women and the elderly, along with a child or two, added to provisions by gathering insects and nuts to supplement protein.

The hunter gatherer, man-woman pairing was an economically equal division of labor. When we settled down to farm, however, the dynamic became weighted toward male economic control. This is where sexual inequity was born.

For the first time since we learned how to lie to one another, we were eating on a regular basis by duping other species with offerings of food. All the extra light and learning was evolving a new kind of memory and instinct in us, one the other animals couldnt share. This pact we called farming, fostered an enormous population explosion. There were enough of us to 'transform' the earth to our needs and enslave most other living things. This in no way resembled our humble beginnings as hunter gatherers.

Farming, like fire, not only isolated us from all other living things, it also made us very sick again, too. Just as when the babies began to come all year round, the death rate increased, but this time it was barely noticed because of the great increase of the population in general.

If we ground the grain into smaller pieces, it went further. A loaf of bread made from two handful of grains could feed more than two people, and the increase of man meant many, many, many more people wanted more and more bread. This increased continous consumption of carbohydrate for a people who had evolved to eat them only a few months of the year killed just as many then as it does now. Ground grains and later, the dried, powdered sweet juice of beets and sugarcane registered into our insulin/blood sugar system like birds on the bottom of the ocean. The was no place for much energy coming in all at once could fit into our systems. More and more people are getting fatter and sicker too. I've mentioned previously, agriculture is one of the biggest disaster in the history of human existence. Stay tuned folks.