ABSTRACT
Statuettes with prominent obesity date from more than 30,000 years ago in the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age (Conrad 2009), and indicate that humans have been aware of excess fat for a very long time. In spite of this long history, understanding this problem required a large base of scientic knowledge that took centuries to develop. To depict this growth of knowledge, I have constructed an inverted triangle (Figure 9.1) designed to indicate that from a small base there is a steady growth of knowledge (Ziman 1976). At the tip of the pyramid, 30,000 years, are the Paleolithic gurines found throughout Eurasia. It took nearly 28,000 of these 30,000 years before a sound clinical base for obesity began to appear in medical cultures around the world, and an additional 1500 years before there was enough knowledge to begin to understand the problem in any detail.
