Reverse Evolution? Were humans once more evolved than we are now?
gicleelife.com
gicleelife.com
There is still an interesting point to the article that speaks to how our current forms have been adapting over the last 10k years or so to agricultural civilization. We have experienced body and gene expression changes that allow us to better survive in our self-created environments, but we still have the legacy of our pre-agricultural survival adaptations that persist. The 4 impacted wisdom teeth in my head support that argument.
"Ask any 10 year old boy if he could have any super power he wanted, chances are he would wish for super strength. I think it is ironic he would wish for ex actly that which we once were."
Or maybe this baseless assumption, along with the whole mentality behind this sort of thinking, comes from a very cultural glorification of some sort of physically strong "Uberman". Note how conveniently the grave also contained a female skeleton, giving us this supposedly perfect man-woman duo. And it's in Europe!
Do I know if that's how it happened or not? No. But neither does the author.
Also, to say that "We are not designed for these (post-hunter-gatherer) foods" is to ignore any changes that may have occurred in the last 10 000 years or so.
Evolution leaves a lot of cruft behind. It never refactors. Humans have fantastic pectoral muscles because we evolved from brachiating primates, for instance. It's no coincidence that human children hang from monkey bars or that we can stretch our arms far overhead and support ourselves hanging from them.
If anything the shift to agriculture has reduced genetic diversity as stuff that had little impact on hunter gatherers are culled from a civilized society.
PS: Alcoholism is actually the default, populations with a long history of alcohol use have far less Alcoholism. However, it's far from eliminated in society's that have been using Alcohol for thousands of years.
As a thought experiment consider the polynesian migrations. Assume that given the longer distance between islands each migration event between islands culls thd weakest 20% so each new founder population has a higher mean muscle mass. That's a one generation selection a lot higher than 1%. With 5 such events it wouldn't surprise me if you moved 1or 2 standard deviations in the mean. Look at the difference in physiogonomx between native Taiwaneese and Maori. Less than 1000 years in those migrations, IIRC.
Here's a couple other nitpicks:
1. Lots of white people have ADD
2. Lots of East Asians are descended from the Mongols, who were hunter-gatherers well into medieval times.
1. White/Caucasians do still have ADD sure but its definitely lower than h-gs. Just so story explanation: more fragmented government together with a crop package that didn't support the same kind of population density as rice, and hence a smaller government/military class meant there were still benefits to ADD, just at lower frequencies than as hunter-gatherers. Frequency dependent selection like psychopathy or morphs generally.
2. AIUI East Asian means Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Vietnamese if you're really pushing it. The important bit is rice farming, with long histories of stable government, occasionally interupted bx war-is-hell but not really disrupting the system. The North Chinese are wheat farmers and relatively genetically distinct from their brethren. They, and the Mongols do almost certainly have higher levels of ADD but I'd bet against it being higher, even as high as amonp Europeans. Even taking the Mongols as East Asian they're a rounding error if you're counting .ch,.jp and .kr
All except Japan were within the Mongol empire mere centuries ago. All have significant genetic influence from the hunting/gathering Mongol hordes. Don't underestimate the genetic influence that nomadic tribes of horseback rapists can have when they conquer a continent.
Perhaps you should say Han instead of Chinese? In context it looks like you mean to exclude Uighurs, Manchus, and other non-Han ethnic groups.
I think the thesis is that eating primarily grains had a lot of negative health consequences for people, as opposed to eating primarily meat and foraging.
From the looks of the code I have to maintain, no."