Cavemen Ate Bread, Study Says page

[Asclepius]

Read for yourselves:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101018/...nm/india522760

[phillyob]

So....the new discovery gives us new evidence!! How exciting! We can now prove that we ate bread not 20,000 years ago like before, but 30,000 years ago. The fact that the article actually attempts to discredit the low carb diets with this news is extremely disingenuous at best. The paleolithic period went from 2.6 million years ago to 12,000 years ago. 30,000 years ago, just like 20,000 is still very recent in our evolution. This, while interesting, is not news and does not affect the science or the case for the Primal Blueprint.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic

[Asclepius]

[JeffC]

"Bread" does not necessarily indicate made with grains though as the second paragraph of that article says this:

"The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal on Monday, indicate that Palaeolithic Europeans ground down plant roots similar to potatoes to make flour, which was later whisked into dough."

This is plant roots and tubers, it is not grains. I've made "bread" out of nut butters.

[Asclepius]

They were grains for cattail-like plants. They wouldn't say grains for no reason (well, to hype up the story obviously, but that isn't totally the case).

[tfarny]

It's interesting to see how this find gets played in the media. "Cavemen ground up starchy tubers and baked proto-sweet potato-pancakes" doesn't really sound as cool as "cavemen baked bread" does it?

[buffalo]

Yes, they said grains for no reason. Potentially to hype up the article, but I think it was just a misunderstanding on the reporters part. The abstract of the paper that the article is talking about references "starch grains". This means a storage format of starch found in many plants used as fuel by the plant. So "starch grains" are found in roots and other parts of the plant, it doesn't mean the well-defended seed portion of the plant, a true "grain". An article about this on Wired mentions cattails and ferns as specific plants ... not sure if this came from the study though, since only the abstract is available onilne for free.

[Asclepius]

It's the same study from the national academy.

[Sam Cree]

I'm also pretty sure these guys weren't following the government food pyramid.

[Stabby]

It doesn't follow that because cavemen didn't eat bread then we shouldn't eat bread so it doesn't follow that if they did then bread is healthy, it is demonstrably unhealthy. Of course the idea is that grains simply didn't constitute a large portion of our diet throughout the millions of years of hunter-gatherer evolution and thus we -may- be maladapted to them. And we are so clearly there wasn't enough selection pressure for the amount that they were eating to make them a healthy food group. It would probably take the reconstruction of the digestive system to resemble that of a bird, forming a ridiculous looking bird-ape. The would be badass, I want one