Intermittent fasting and the aquatic ape

I think about the Aquatic Ape hypothesis of human development a lot more than I write about it. In fact, it informs close to everything about the way I see human life. I've wanted to write about it for years, but it's so big for me, that the task is overwhelming.

So now, whenever I do write a little bit about it, or have a thought, I'll put it here. Incomplete, hasty, unreferenced, and all. For now. It's a start.

I posted the following today on a thread about Intermittent Fasting. Much discussion of this topic seems to center around, or at least harbor, the assumption that Paelolithic and pre-agricultural humans, and proto-humans, would not have been able to eat at regular intervals. This is my contribution to the discussion, which can be found here.

Just a little background: The Inuit at the time mentioned (early 20th century) lived a traditional lifestyle and ate their traditional diet, which was almost entirely fish and water. They also ate some land mammal meat. They were known for their remarkable good health. No vegetables -- yet no scurvy, or other chronic diseases.

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In Adventures in Diet, Vil describes three squares plus a snack for the Inuit. Times he mentions for eating, or for beginning meal prep, are 7 am, 11 am, 4 pm, and for the snack, just before bed.

Now I'm going to bring up the Aquatic Ape again. That's the hypothesis that says many human features can be explained by a period in our evolution during which circumstances led us to begin to evolve into aquatic mammals, but the process was only partial. According to this, we can understand some things about ourselves by reference to other aquatic mammals or by reference to our affinity to aquatic and semi-aquatic conditions. (The big flaw I saw in the supposed refutation of this that someone posted a link to on another thread was that the guy pointed to all kinds of way that we are not totally like aquatic mammals. Well, no kidding. The hypothesis explains the ways in which we're [i]partially[/i] aquatic like. For instance... oh, I need to save that for another thread.)

Fish. Three times a day plus snacks. Pretty easy to come by. Even today, if a person dwells by open bodies of water, like a lake or a river. (Today, every person dwells by water -- we had to invent plumbing and wells to make that possible. But I'm talking about open water, including, human-made lakes.) Of course, there's pollution, unfortunately, that can make the catch toxic. But the point is, it's not hard to get enough fish to eat all day, even now.

When we think of pre-agricultural humans, for some reason we tend to think of them rummaging around on land, foraging (most people, not necessarily Bus riders) and hunting. And in that scenario, it sounds difficult to scrounge up three squares and a snack, day in day out. Exhausting. Time consuming. Bloody and messy, with fur and bones everywhere.

For some reason that I can't explain, people just don't put food from the water in a central place in the equation. But I assure you, if you were out in the middle of nowhere and needed to survive, you would find water, very quickly. You'd need it before, and more frequently than food. And in that water, you'd find things to eat far easier to catch and kill than anything on land. Except, of course, for bugs. And our primal ancestors were insectivores.

It makes sense to me that fish and other water critters are a missing food link between insects and big land animals. From the water is where we got enough protein and Omega 3 to grow brains big enough to figure out how to kill the animals we need considerable intelligence to kill. We don't have the teeth and claws and speed to hunt a gazells. We have the [i]brains[/i] to do it.

Back to the point. People think the Paleo folks must have had a lifestyle involving long periods between meals, including intervals of days. I acknowledge that there are more recent hunter societies where this has been known to occur. However, I disagree that it was a necessary, ordinary, universal feature of preagricultural human and protohuman life. Not when a meal is as near as the river, pond, lake or ocean.