Kevin Klatt, PhD, RD

berkley.edu With the ever growing emphasis on understanding how human nutrient needs evolved, I think it's pertinent to remember all of the forces of evolution -- I said back when I first started this blog that there's a strong chance that specific human populations likely have nutrition/metabolism variants related to the forces of evolution besides selection in a specific nutritope. Recent evidence suggests that gene flow may have played quite an important role in the evolution of metabolism. This evidence stems from the recent sequencing of a high quality Neanderthal genome by Svaante Paabo's group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, leading evolutionary biologists and anthropologists to suggest that ancestral populations interbred with Neanderthals. Neanderthals and humans likely diverged from their last common ancestor, which has eluded paleoanthropologists (1), about 1 mya; however, molecular clock data suggests a more recent LCA (2). Nea...

Throughout evolution there was a sort of trade dental health off - or so it's been accepted. As hominids started consuming more soft starches (like grains, especially cooked), we accepted the detrimental effects of cavities over tooth wear/enamel erosion. ( for a great read on the evolution of dentition, check out John Hawk's blog ) Before domesticated food and modern technologies, the teeth were subject to a lot more stresses that could wear away the enamel. When you start eating starchy crops, much softer after heat treatment and processing, this issue goes away - but another arises. Starchy crops are easily fermented by bacteria and also stick to teeth - the perfect formula for dental caries (cavities). It's been generally shown across hominid fossils from the Paleolithic and Mesolithic that dental caries were a rarity - there is one famous Pleistocene skull found in Zambia that was replete with cavities. Even Neanderthal samples don't show much evidence of regul...