Dietary Shifts and the European Upper Palaeolithic Transition

Datos Bibliográficos

ID7740859
AutoresSusan Cachel (Cornell University, autor de correspondencia)
Año1997
Volumen38
Número4
Páginas579-603
Fecha de publicación1997-08-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCurrent Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382
EditorialUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/204647
OpenAlexW2028739407
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas30

High‐latitude modern humans with traditional diets must maintain a critical ratio of dietary fat to protein. An analysis of 15 New World Arctic groups reveals that the abundance and predict ability of dietary fat affects eight social variables. Assuming that the physiology of extinct Palaeolithic humans resembles that of anatomically modern humans and that dietary carbohydrates were limited, constraints to their behavior must have existed. These constraints were determined by the physiological necessity of maintaining a critical ratio of dietary fat to protein. At the end of the European Middle Palaeolithic, a relatively subtle dietary shift occurred; an initial increase in dietary fat would have increased population size with very little lag time. Later in the Upper Palaeolithic, dietary breadth expanded. These dietary shifts may have affected hominid biology and social behavior, with selection pressure being exercised principally through population growth. A relaxation of selection pressure for skeletal robusticity could have resulted in high‐protein diets without intolerable calciuria. The cascading, interacting consequences of population increase would eventually have resulted in a phase change which is identified as the Upper Palaeolithic. If similar physiology is assumed, different human groups may have independently acquired traits of modernity. The effect of population expansion in temperate areas is dramatic, because dietary carbohydrates are always seasonally limited. In the eastern Canadian Arctic, the transition between the Dorset culture and the Thule culture offers a recent analogue to the European Middle Palaeolithic/Upper Palaeolithic transition

Archaeology · Arctic · Biology · Geography · Nutrition transition · Obesity · Population · Upper Paleolithic · Zoology · Demography · Diet and metabolism studies · Ecology · Endocrinology · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology