It has not happened
yet but it is reasonable that termite in particular will be converted into an
attractive food source. It is simply too
easy and a worthy research target.
Other insects are out
there as well but the termite is the one everyone knows and sees and its own
eating habits are generally fastidious.
They also achieve a high density.
The payoff in food
quality likely also approaches that of eggs as well.
The
benefits of eating bugs
Meet
the new Paleo diet
By Daniella
Martin | March 1, 2014
YOU'VE PROBABLY HEARD of
the Stone Age diet craze known as the Paleolithic Diet, made popular most
recently by Dr. Loren Cordain's best-seller The
Paleo Diet. The premise is simple: If our early human ancestors couldn't
have eaten it, we shouldn't, either. It's the one time, it seems, that being
like a caveman is a good thing.
The
theory goes (and archaeological evidence corroborates) that early
hunter-gatherers, while they may not have lived as long, still had some major
health advantages on most of us modern humans. They were much taller, averaging
6-foot-5 to our 5-foot-11; had stronger, heavier bones; had more robust immune
systems; and were leaner, tougher, and hardier than we are today. Higher levels
of physical activity also played a vital role in cave people's vitality, and so
did their high levels of wild food consumption: wild game meat, gathered greens
and fruits, and healthy fats such as nuts.
Cordain
suggests that prior to the agricultural revolution, early humans ate this Paleo
Diet for 2.5 million years. The 10,000 years since the popularization of
farming — or just 333 human generations — he says, is clearly a drop in the
chronological bucket when compared with the millennia leading up to it. Thus,
he maintains, the hunter-gatherer diet our ancestors lived on is far more
deeply and indelibly imprinted into our DNA than our habits of the last few
thousand years. I'm inclined to agree with him. In fact, I'm going to see his
2.5 million years and raise him a few millennia, and show you what we were
really designed to eat. The real Paleo Diet would have included bugs. Lots and
lots of bugs.
"From
the time mammals first appeared until 50 million years ago — a total of 150
million years, three quarters of the entire time mammals have existed — our
ancestors were primarily insectivorous," write S. Boyd Eaton and Dorothy
A. Nelson in their paper "Calcium in Evolutionary Perspective."
"Given the slow and conservative nature of genetic evolution, this
long-standing adaptation for insect consumption must have made a significant
impact on our genetic heritage. Consequently, the nutritional properties of
insects have relevance for understanding the forces that have shaped the
nutritional requirements of present-day humans."
IT'S EASY TO OBSERVE this
early pre-human diet in the wild today, since versions of this prehistoric
bug-guzzler still exist in the form of bush babies, tree shrews, and similar
small mammals. It turns out that for a certain size of primate, bugs are one of
the best things on the planetary menu. If we were still that size, that's
pretty much all we'd eat, too.
But
for whatever reason, we grew, in both body and brain size. And as we grew, it
became harder to find enough insects to fulfill our daily nutritional
requirement. The problem was not with the bugs themselves, but just that we
couldn't find enough of them. We had to start branching out. We had to find
something more dependable as a source of calories than that which could see us
coming and, say, crawl into a hole. So we started eating plants, which, of
course, couldn't run away. This is one of the miracles and geniuses of being a
primate: our innate adaptability to different diets, also known as omnivory
("omni" = everything, "vory" = eating). We adapted so that
we could eat everything and anything and still survive.
We
changed inside and out in order to take advantage of the different types of
nutrient sources around us, and as we evolved, we took different paths to get
there. Some primates adapted internal organs so that they could digest
cellulose and extract protein and other nutrients from leaves like herbivores.
Some grew long tails and relocated to the treetops, where the good fruit was,
and lived off that. Meanwhile others — the ones who eventually became humanity
— moved to the savanna, where they could see both prey and predators coming and
still find enough vegetable matter to supplement their diets.
But
the one thing that none of these versions of ourselves ever stopped eating, at
least when they had the chance, was insects. From lemurs and other New World
apes, up through Old World apes like chimpanzees and gorillas, up through
prehominids, hominids, Neanderthals, and, finally, humans, one thing that
unites primatehood throughout the ages is an enduring appetite for bugs.
The
main reason for this is that insects are a much higher quality food compared to
things like leaves, fruits, flowers, and even nuts. Just like other animals,
insects are a trophic level two food source — they themselves have eaten, and
thereby concentrated in their own tissues, the nutrients found in plant
sources, providing the sorts of things that primates thrive on: protein, iron,
calcium, and, best of all, healthy, unsaturated long-chain essential fatty
acids (EFAs).
Sure,
these nutrients can be found in plant sources, too, but you have to eat a lot
more of them. Insects are these scrumptious little compact packages of food
that make surviving, and thriving, so much easier for a foraging primate.
Nutrition is sort of like money: If leaves represent dollar bills, fruits are
fives, nuts are tens, and insects and other forms of animal flesh are crisp
fifty-dollar bills. The nutrients in them are just more concentrated and often
more bioavailable, which means the body has to do less work to utilize them.
WHEN YOU THINK of
the hallmarks of evolution, what image pops up? For many, it's the picture of a
chimp with a stick, moistened to catch termites. But like a dog that stares at
the pointing finger instead of the ball, we've been focusing entirely on the tool
and ignoring its ultimate purpose: to capture and consume insects more
efficiently. Scientists in the Congo River Basin have observed chimps utilizing
a collection of implements, a "toolkit" if you will, in order to
better harvest termites: one short stick to puncture an aboveground mound,
and then a longer, slenderer "fishing probe" to pull the termites
out. This fishing probe was often further modified to increase its
effectiveness. The chimps used their teeth to fray the end like a paintbrush,
the better to collect the insects with.
Infant
chimps watch carefully as their mothers collect and customize stick tools, find
and puncture termite mounds, and deftly extract the crawling black morsels. It
is this process of watching, learning, and assimilating through social
interaction and observed behavior that many scientists believe to be the roots
of civilization.
In
fact, as it turns out, the skill of collecting termites is easier observed than
done. When the scientists themselves tried to extract termites from the mounds
using the same tools and methods the chimps did, they found it quite difficult.
"We were less successful than most of the [chimp] youngsters — this is a
complex skill that is developed with years of practice," said the appropriately
named co-authoring anthropologist Crickette Sanz.
Humanity's great
technological and cultural achievements likely began in much the same way. The
earliest bone tools found by archaeologists are thought to have been used
specifically for insect gathering. A 2001 study on bone tools left behind
by Australopithecus robustus, a
million-plus-year-old distant relative to modern humans, theorized that they
were used to scrape away at termite mounds in order to harvest the inhabitants.
This was the first evidence that our early human ancestors were
"methodical insectivores."
And
it's no wonder, according to paleontologist Lucinda Backwell, who co-authored
the study, since termites have a higher nutritional content than rump steak.
"Termites
are a valuable source of protein, fat, and essential amino acids, in the diets
of both primates and modern humans," wrote Backwell. "While rump
steak yields 322 calories per 100 grams, and cod fish 74, termites provide 560
calories per 100 grams."
Let's
imagine you are an evolving proto-human, and you have this excellent source of
protein, fat, and other nutrients, and it doesn't require you to run, throw a
spear, or hold your breath. Insect eating, during the right seasons, is like
the drive-through window at McDonald's — a big caloric payoff for comparatively
low energetic output.
Cordain
and other Paleo Diet advocates and researchers paint a picture of early man as
an aggressive and skillful hunter, bringing home piles of meat to his hungry
family. But reality was likely quite different. And here is the bug in the
system, or, rather, the glaring lack thereof.
As the author of the
blog PaleoVeganology quips,
"It's as though someone took a big can of Raid to the authors'
paleo-imaginations. So steeped are they in their Western food bias and
paleofantasies that the possibility of Paleolithic man fulfilling his nutrient
requirements with a diet of creepy-crawlies never occurred to them."
HUNTING, ESPECIALLY IN the
Neolithic age, was quite a risky activity, from both a safety and an energy
investment standpoint. Twisting an ankle in the bush or being injured by a
charging animal without any medical care could mean death. It was also a very
hit-or-miss sort of activity.
Early
hunters experienced about a 20 percent success rate. That means two to three
out of every 10 times they ventured out they might return with a big dead
animal. Granted, some of these kills would feed the tribe for several days or
even weeks, but at those rates, they would have starved if not for the steady stream
of calories brought in by gathered and foraged food, such as tubers, greens,
and small animals that included, to a large extent, insects and other
invertebrates. On a day-to-day basis, things like insects would have been
regular fare, the kinds of things that kept early people going between big
kills.
In
order to do this type of gathering, though, an animal had to be able to hold
things in its hands and still travel. It had to be able to walk upright — you
try walking on all fours while holding something in your hands. It's even been
suggested that the gathering of things like insects would have influenced our
shift to bipedalism. Yes, you could, if you wanted to, even partially credit
bugs with your ability to walk.
Since
it was usually the men doing the hunting (this is the case even in chimpanzee
communities), the women would have been the ones gathering, as it's something
that can be done with a baby on your back. While the men went out and often
came back empty-handed, the women came home every day with at least something
to feed the tribe, their mates, and, most important, their children. The
majority of the day-to-day protein was actually provided by women and,
potentially, largely through insects.
A
four-year study on savanna chimpanzees, conducted by anthropologists Jill
Pruetz and Paco Bertolani, yielded the observation that it is the female
chimps, by and large, who use tools to hunt, not the males. They concluded
that this discovery supports a theory that females played a significant role in
the evolution of tool technology among the earliest humans.
Oh,
how times have changed: When an early female hominid saw a bug and shrieked, it
was in excitement, because hey, lunch.
No comments:
Post a Comment