ABSTRACT
Today’s dietary problems of excessive energy intake and obesity are relatively new phenomena in evolutionary history. As man evolved, the ability to store excess energy as body fat was a favorable evolutionary strategy for survival in periods with limited food availability. Although humans evolved under fundamentally different environmental conditions, at the genetic level, we are still essentially the same as we were at the end of Paleolithic Era some 10,000 years ago. Thus, the human genome has hardly adapted to the profound dietary and environmental changes that were ushered in by the agricultural revolution some 10,000 years ago, a fairly recent development in evolutionary terms. Boyd Eaton and colleagues at Emory University have spent several decades reconstructing prehistoric diets from anthropological evidence and observations of surviving hunter-gatherer societies and several overview articles on the matter have been published.
