Center of Natural and Cultural Human History, Danube Private University, 3500 Krems, Austria.
Integrative Prehistory and Archaeological Science, University of Basel, 4055 Basel, Switzerland.
Nutrients. 2022 Aug 31;14(17):3594. doi: 10.3390/nu14173594.
Anyone who wants to understand the biological nature of humans and their special characteristics must look far back into evolutionary history. Today's way of life is drastically different from that of our ancestors. For almost 99% of human history, gathering and hunting have been the basis of nutrition. It was not until about 12,000 years ago that humans began domesticating plants and animals. Bioarchaeologically and biochemically, this can be traced back to our earliest roots. Modern living conditions and the quality of human life are better today than ever before. However, neither physically nor psychosocially have we made this adjustment and we are paying a high health price for it. The studies presented allow us to reconstruct food supply, lifestyles, and dietary habits: from the earliest primates, through hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic, farming communities since the beginning of the Anthropocene, to the Industrial Age and the present. The comprehensive data pool allows extraction of all findings of medical relevance. Our recent lifestyle and diet are essentially determined by our culture rather than by our millions of years of ancestry. Culture is permanently in a dominant position compared to natural evolution. Thereby culture does not form a contrast to nature but represents its result. There is no doubt that we are biologically adapted to culture, but it is questionable how much culture humans can cope with.
任何人如果想了解人类的生物本性及其独特特征，就必须追溯到进化历史的深处。如今的生活方式与我们祖先的生活方式截然不同。在人类历史的 99%的时间里，采集和狩猎一直是营养的基础。直到大约 12000 年前，人类才开始驯化植物和动物。从生物考古学和生物化学的角度来看，这可以追溯到我们最早的根源。如今，现代生活条件和人类生活质量比以往任何时候都要好。然而，无论是身体上还是心理社会上，我们都没有做出这种调整，为此我们付出了高昂的健康代价。呈现的这些研究使我们能够重建食物供应、生活方式和饮食习惯：从最早的灵长类动物，到旧石器时代的狩猎采集者，再到人类世开始的农耕社区，一直到工业时代和现在。综合的数据池允许提取所有具有医学相关性的发现。我们最近的生活方式和饮食主要由我们的文化决定，而不是由我们数百万年的祖先决定。与自然进化相比，文化一直处于主导地位。文化并不是与自然相对立，而是自然的结果。毫无疑问，我们在生物学上适应了文化，但人类能适应多少文化是值得怀疑的。
