Stone Age Diet invalidated! Not.

A lot of people have sent me articles (see here and here) on the recent study that identified processed plant food as a part of the human diet going back 30,000 years.  Crap!  Maybe I shouldn't have left my job to write The Caveman Manifesto.

First, let's take a look at the headlines.

• Yahoo: "Bread was around 30,000 years ago"
• NYT: "New evidence found for flour in Stone-Age Diet"

Compare these sensational headlines with the title of the paper:

• "Thirty thousand-year-old evidence of plant food processing"

So we've gone from "processed plant food" to "flour" to "bread".  Hmmm...

Second, what plants was early man actual eating?  Nobody suggests that paleolithic man exclusively ate animal foods.  Nobody.  The claim is that grains weren't a substantial portion of the paleolithic diet (if at all).  

So Melissa McEwen did the unthinkable -- she read the paper!  Bravo, Melissa.  Turns out that of the 9 plants they identified on a primitive mortal and pestle, only 1 was a seed.  (What we call grains are actually seeds of grasses, like wheat.)  The rest were roots and rhizomes.  Eating a few roots and grinding them up beforehand is not news, people.

Read all of Melissa's post for the complete take-down -- it's good.  And her commentary on bullshit media coverage.  The isotope studies don't lie.