How To Eat Like A Human with Paleontologist Dr Bill Schindler!

welcome to the plant free MD podcast with Dr Anthony chafee where we discuss diet and nutrition and how this affects health and chronic disease and show you how you can use this to optimize your health and happiness both mentally and physically [Music] hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsor at carnivore bar I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat for those times that you're out hiking road tripping or stuck at work and you want nutritious snack that is just meat fat and salt if you want it the carnivore bar is a great option so I like this product not because it's just pure meat but also because I want the carnivore Market to thrive as well and the more we support meat only products the more meat only products that will be available in the mainstream so if this sounds like something you'd like to get behind check it out using my discount code Anthony to get 10 off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25 off total all right thanks guys all right hello everyone this is uh Dr Anthony chafee I'm here with a very special guest Dr Bill Schindler who is author of the book eat like a human got it here and uh met him down in ketocon this year and really enjoyed uh really enjoyed that and really enjoyed his talks he's an archaeologist and professor of archeology and and has just been all over the world um you know studying what it is to be human and and where we got there and how uh Dr Schindler thank you so much for joining us and it's my pleasure to be here I'm so thankful we're doing this uh you know you say that we met at ketocon I looked at the program and saw the title you're talking and what your background was and yours was the first talk in fact because we had the booth yours was one of the only ones I was able to actually get to the full thing okay and uh you know it was it was great to hear doing some really cool work awesome well thank you very much I appreciate it um so for for people that aren't aren't familiar with you can you tell us a bit about yourself your background and and what you do sure so I'm not a medical doctor my my doctor my PhD is in archeology and anthropology and I ca I come at all of this through that lens um I've been uh interested in food and diet and health actually my entire life most of it from the beginning because I had an incredibly unhealthy relationship with food and I was suffering from all sorts of different metabolic disease because of the way that I ate and always trying to solve it I always had an eye towards that but just in general because archeology is so focused on things right as an archaeologist we dig up the remains of activities or means of things that that our ancestors or ancestors made and try to make sense of them when I realized years ago that almost every single prehistoric technology ever made has something to do with food and by by you know by default food diet health and all of that and our diet changing diets over millions of years impacted our evolutionary change I realized there was really something important there and maybe all the questions I've been asking my entire life asking of doctors and nutritionists and you know trying to get information from magazines and the FDA and everywhere else we try to get that health information from maybe the answers weren't to be found there maybe they were to be found in the archaeological record so I dove really deep for a long time uh using using my work in archeology to better understanding successful diets and then more recently over the past seven or eight years um you can imagine how incredibly difficult it is to piece together um all of what you're looking for from this incomplete archaeological record I started to plug gaps when I realized the value of studying and living and working with indigenous and traditional groups that are still in many ways using some ancestral and traditional approaches to food so my family and I have spent a lot of time we've been very fortunate to be able to travel and live and work with these indigenous and traditional groups to sort of plug their those holes in where we have in the archaeological records so you could say at some level you know I've looked to the past my entire life but more recently over the past 20 years been putting that together into practice and trying to use our ancestral dietary past to understand how we as humans should be feeding ourselves today very good and what are some of those uh different different peoples around the world that you're that are still living around and living sort of a more traditional way that you guys were able to to spend time with so there's a bunch and what's really cool is that um you know that Dr Weston Price uh has had a strong influence on me from since I first read physical uh nutrition physical degeneration um and at some level we weren't trying to retrace his footsteps do a very similar thing that that he did and document which okay super cool these groups from different parts of the world and their their resource bases were different from one another both in what the raw materials were that they had access to but also how they got them we spent time with um in Tanzania with um the hots of the oldest hunter-gather group in the world and at the same time we spent time in in Kenya with us on Borough Warriors to realize you know they have cattle they raise cattle their semi-nomatic pastoralists and they drink blood and milk and so different resource bases different Technologies and ways of getting those resources and and making them as safe and nourishing as possible for their own bodies but what we were able to find the same sort of thing that that Western price found is that even though the actual things might be different the the same uh they're still trying to fill the same nutritional Voyage or they're still trying to to nourish themselves with the same kinds of foods and there's a lot of similarities whether they're hunter-gatherer groups like The hadza or pastoralists like um like the sombrero there's a lot of time in Mongolia with um groups out on the step where one of the main parts of their diet was fermented dairy um we spent time in in Bolivia with imara groups and in Peru with quechua um all over and I'd love I'd love to talk about a bunch of but the other thing that's really interesting is that you know I I do have in my mind this this romantic view of going and traveling really far to get somewhere to spend time with a group that's isolated as possible to get this information and and there's so much incredible value from that and we've done that but we've also spent time in in Germany and in Ireland and in England and in places where um there's still you know there's modern people living modern lives but still adhering to certain Traditions that are really really powerful that we can get uh incredible information from them as well very cool Mongolia must been badass like what do you guys uh do over there I I think I saw one thing that you said you were in Mongolian you had like a like a fermented milk like alcohol like how was that yeah so you know I I Mongolia is one of my favorite places in the in the world and what I loved about you know as an archaeologist um I I love watching hands and the skill of people to to that they can trans the skill and the knowledge and the know-how but they can take over all material and transform it in a matter of minutes or seconds or hours into something completely different I remember we we had to get on this course um and there's a lot of bareback riding incredible horsemanship in Mongolia and I am not a great horse but there was just there was this horse and we're supposed to get on this horse and ride this course and uh literally we're in the middle of nowhere on the step I mean we had been I bet you it's was you know 12 hour drive not even on roads to get to the nearest town I mean we're in the middle of nowhere and we were with this um uh they had some cattle and some camels and it was just a man and a woman a married couple and I think I was worse and they said where where was the stuff I held on to like were you right on bareback and I said I get that part but my hands what do I hold on to and the man this is true translators but the man and the woman looked at each other and the guy disappears and he comes back with this huge sack full of camel hair I mean it was just this huge sack he could barely carry it was so heavy and him and his wife stood on either side of the sack and she's feeding pulling this camel hair out of this out of this sack and he's twisting and twisting and he's making this cordage and he's doing it in ways I haven't seen and I mean in a matter of minutes they had a full Bridle with I didn't even know the terminology and it was perfect perfect size they put it right in front of the horse and I'm sitting there and I jump on this horse and I was unbelievable but anyhow what they can do with nothing um and and make it useful nourishing is incredible so there is a huge part and I love I'm glad we're starting with Mongolia because I love some of the takeaways from this I do believe um that the human digestive tract is incredibly inefficient and weak and we started to outgrow it about three and a half million years ago when we started making our first technologies that allowed us to process food outside of our body before we started consuming it so here we are living in bodies that have brain nutritional needs because of the size of their brain because of the size of our bodies that um we can't meet using just our teeth and our fingers and our and our in our digestive tract so we must in in most cases use technology to take the raw material make it as safe and nourishing as possible the one exception to that in my mind at least the one food that humans are perfectly designed to consume is dairy and that's only for a short period of our life right when we're first born where mammals or infants were designed to do this but just like other mammals when we get weaned off of our mothers we start to suppress or lose the ability to safely and efficiently consume Dairy now for most for many people they'll sit there and say well that that just proves that just shows that we shouldn't be drinking milk as adults from other animals but that that isn't how I I see it if that's the Viewpoint that we should eat almost everything if if we took away all the Technologies right to do anything um you take away the plows you take away the oven you take away the vitamixes and the fermentation rooms and all these other sorts of things the Spears and the bows and the guns and all of those things then we really don't have access to much food at all we require these Technologies so to me the question isn't when it comes to Dairy should we consume Dairy I mean that's a good question we should have a conversation but a more important question and one that we can really have a real conversation about is how can we most safely and efficiently consume Dairy and in one thing that I think we should do to answer that question this is where Mongolia is the perfect poster child for it is look at ourselves and how we as infants when we were perfectly designed to take this raw material and make the best use of it you know what did we do and this is what we do is as infants and we take milk barely for a second because the Mongolia thing comes back it's because it is the perfect example when we're when we're infants we drink from our mothers the milk that comes from others is body temperature teeming with live bacteria already in the process of fermentation and the bacteria that are there are are through it you know evolutionary for a long time through Revolution uh that has figured out that it that bacteria operates best of body temperature just works perfect so it's in the process of fermenting it goes into our bodies and we as infant mammals just like other infant mammals produce enzymes to break down the fats or the lipase um to deal with the sugar the uh so we produce lactase we all mammals produce some type of an enzyme that does something to the proteins that allows it to coagulate um in most cases it's chimacin and humans it's something a little bit different but it does the same thing and it coagulates the milk and slows it down so we have time to process discipline chemically break it down so we can get all the nutrients from it and what all of these things are happening then that milk is one of the most nourishing foods in the planet for our bodies when we when we uh our our um become wean when we weaned off of our mothers we like other animals start to lose the ability to produce those enzymes so it is not I used to I grew up without any issues with lactose in my family but there was like one kid in school that was lactose intolerant and we thought that's the weird kid like that's the weird kid that's lactose I had that image in my head I knew like four people in the world that were lactose intolerant because my world was so small that to me lactose intolerance is weird I think many of us especially in certain parts of the world have that same image so it's weird to have somebody a human that's lactose intolerant but the reality is it's weird that some of us are lactose tolerant like it's the norm for us and other mammals to lose the ability to produce that enzyme lactase that breaks down the sugars lactose and and for humans there were several different independent genetic mutations some in Europe and some in Africa where there was a huge dependence on the Middle where there was an independent completely different genetic mutations that allowed our our bodies to produce lactase um into adulthood 60 today 60 of adult humans are lactose intolerant still so um the the cool thing about fermentation is that when you ferment the dairy right the dairy's full of bacteria and it's fermenting it's lactobacillus bacteria that eat the lactose and produce lactic acid and a bunch of other important chemical and physical changes and as it consumes that lactose that lactose level goes down so when you have yogurt that's fermented for 24 hours there's no lactose in it when you have a cheese that's been through the full traditional cheese to the full fermentation process um and it's age that she's had either has very little or zero lactose in it um any any fermented dairy product kefir for example has a lot less almost zero lactose compared to what it was when it was before it was fermented so here we are in Mongolia where you have an incredibly strong dependence on Dairy I mean it is the main stay out on the steps that's a staple part of everyone's diet and you would expect that they have a high degree of lactose tolerance that they would have gone through some but somebody would have had this genetic mutation that seemed like it worked natural selection would work perfectly and all of a sudden almost everybody's lactose tolerant as adults but it's almost the exact opposite almost everybody in Mongolia traditionally are lactose intolerant but they have this huge dependence on milk um and the difference is nobody drinks milk you don't see anybody taking a cup of milk and drinking it or taking the milk important on cereal in the morning like the way most Americans try to consume milk the dairy is always fermented it's always fermented they make Yak butter it is fermented Yak butter that they ferment and age and Yak stomachs they make all sorts of these fermented dairy things that they then dry on top of the gear or the Yurts and they even make as you mentioned this alcohol this beer where with fermented marriage milk marriage milk has a high amount of sugar in it and if ferments very well and produces alcohol now it's not a really high it's like I don't know two and a half percent or something like this but they ferment it it's uh it's very interesting it's got a it's actually got a really cool flavor and they also distill it into a milk vodka which I I smoked I smoked some home um in a water bottle and it looks like my son who I obviously everybody had to try it no matter how old it works everybody had to try it so our kids are super young and my son at the time was 10 and he had to say put it through his nose and he smelled it he looked at it tasted it and he said it smelled and tasted like liquid blue cheese which it did oh but it was it was super interesting but Anthony I know it was a little bit of a tangent but I think it had an important one with it with the lactose yeah no definitely and um I I mean I think that um you know just I mean obviously seeing how how people like you know live traditionally now it is a good you know marriage because they've been doing this stuff for thousands of years a lot of these people you know and you go up to I don't know if you want to you know with with Inuits and things like that but if you guys have been doing that you know since the ice ages essentially I would imagine you know and um and so it's I think I think it's very interesting and and the alcohol too that's something that people always ask me is like do you drink alcohol I'm like no not really it's a plant well what if they made like you know like meat based you know alcohol I'm like probably not it's still a poison but uh you know some some Yak vodka maybe you know I think I'd try it anyway you have to try it yeah yeah and I think if you're if you're in that in that area you know when you when you're like you're out like you say just like hundreds of miles away from from anywhere and you know you have that I mean you know when in Rome you know and when in Europe you know you should just uh you know do as do as they do you know the context is so important like it's one thing for us to sit here and I mean we're how many miles away from one another we're 12 hours apart at the moment we're sitting here talking about uh you know Mary's milk fermented Mary's milk in Mongolia and it's it's a great conversation but being there and trying it and having it is such a completely different thing and yeah you do if anybody gets the chance you have to you have to try it yeah that would be awesome um you uh also talked about um I remember seeing something you were saying like you're interested in food you were interested in hunting you're also interested in tools you had a great uh showcase showing how like your people actually made tools and things like that and I saw one thing where you were saying that you wanted to be able to make all the tools and go hunting and like you know like make the bow and arrow make the arrowheads you know Fletch the arrows yourself like you know shoot the deer and then cook it in a fire that you made and uh and that has to be one of the most raw badass things that I've ever heard I mean it's like it's like what it is to be a man you know it's just like you go you get food you make fire you know and like that's it you know like how was that do you still did you did you end up actually doing that and being able to do the whole process absolutely and we've done it in a couple different contexts uh and that was you know I'm so glad you broke it up and I forgot I even talked about that that was the reason I became an archaeologist so I always my father always had me outside hunting and fishing and trapping and hiking and camping and doing all those sorts of things and I he really instilled in me this love for the past at that time with what we knew about the world I mean there was Indians and there was you know fur Trappers in the 1800s and things and we used to read all these biographies and look for arrowheads and that but we had no idea about the depth of um you know our human ancestral lineage and how deep it really went and what it all meant but he instilled all of that in me and I grew up in the 70s and the 80s and I loved hunting and and the connection that my father and I made with one another and we made with the environment and we made with nature and with the food we got all of that connection was awesome and I was always looking for a little bit more and I I wanted that I I you know it was cool it was really awesome for me to go out and wake you know get up early and go into it sit in the woods in the woods would come alive over several hours when the sun came up and listened to the animals and you know be able to to harvest the deer and take care of it ourselves and bring it home and and eat it but the gun in my hand felt a little different than what I wanted you know I wanted I wanted to shoot I wanted to use a bow so I started bow hunting but it still was somebody else like a whole bunch of people I never met were between me and that food because they made that bow and again it's and this isn't just going out and hunting at all it's such an incredibly visceral connective experience but I was always looking for just a little bit more so I'm gonna learn to make bows and arrows and I'm gonna make a bow and I'm gonna kill a deer so I started to learn how to make it wasn't the internet right you had a couple of books and there were some people I heard about that did these things so I went and worked with some people and red is everything I could and I finally made a bow and um and I was trying to do the arrows and all this which was great but it was the arrowheads that were the stopping point like I didn't really realize that there were people that still knew how to make arrowheads it turns out there's a huge Community around the world with flint knappers and stone tool you know people that I've since been in you know deep contact with and become a part of that Community but then I had no idea in like 19 90. I had no idea that there were other people doing these things so I started to play around with a little bit um read what I could but at the time I was living in New Jersey and I if I was going to go to all this work I didn't want to look at a book on how Californian Indians made Stone points I wanted to use the rocks from I mean I was going down a rabbit hole I realized but I was I wanted the Rock from New Jersey I wanted the same shape I wanted it made the same way and I wanted to you know try to recreate all these things and I couldn't find the answers to those questions so I said it's it's this these answers are an archeology like let me let me figure out how I mean let me become an archaeologist and I'll yeah I wanted to become an archaeologist so I could deer hunt really that was about what it was so I I did and it was an amazing it's been an amazing journey because I I finally did answer those questions but more importantly I found out that there were questions I didn't even know I should be asking um like the you know I what I was looking for was essentially what I said in the beginning how do we create these Technologies to actually get this food and do something with this food but I didn't realize it was so across the board um yeah I mean it is it is uh yeah it was you say Bad Assets I love that term but it was so connective and rewarding now I will be honest my son and I we still bow hunt um and actually we're going on a huge hunt um in December uh and we're actually just started making new bows for it but we also gun hunt so we love that connective piece that comes with it but we also are very interested in making sure that our freezer is full for the winter so we we do a little bit of both but um yeah it's really really cool oh very cool and um and then you were on a show the great human race and um and I haven't had a chance to watch that yet I'm still trying to like like I think it's on you you said it was on Amazon I think it's an Amazon it's a couple places but Amazon Prime has it for sure there you go yeah and so I haven't had a chance to watch it yet but like I've seen some promos for it and uh and that sounded cool as hell yeah like were they just they can you tell us a bit about that where they sort of you know put you out in like different you know period sort of you know instances you should have to sort of live like the people did at the time absolutely yeah so this was now what six years ago um it was six years ago the Survival TV you know world was really hitting its peak there have been a bunch of shows for a while and then a bunch of things like dual survivor and dude you're screwed and a bunch of other things and it was actually starting to get really silly because they were running out of ideas that was naked and afraid which I think is maybe even still going on um there's a bunch of these shows and Madison everybody was scrambling for the next new thing and it was like I said it was getting silly they were tying you know they take two people and tie them together and make them go survive and they do all that sort of thing um but National Geographic um got together now this National Geographic Studios and National Geographic the society I mean Studios does the TV stuff and the society does like the magazine and the research and that sort of thing um most of the programming for National Geographic just comes from the studios but for this particular project they both got together um and they came up with a I thought a brilliant idea and they said listen let's take it instead of just trying to make something crazy and new a novel so they get viewership um and jump on this Survival TV bandwagon let's use this sort of wave that's still you know about to hit its Crest and use it to tell an incredibly important story of our shared ancestral human past and they did they didn't know exactly what they were going to do but they knew they could do something and do it really cool and they contacted me uh to be a part of it they had already had my co-star cat big me who's a survivalist she does a lot of high desert survival out west and they brought me in uh as you know the partner we're going to be a team and my job was to recreate the Technologies from different time periods in the past right the tools which is one of my specialties and what they were going to do is they were going to take us and what they did was there's 10 episodes over this series and it starts at two and a half million years ago at that time and this is only six years ago we thought that uh the earliest stone tools in the world dated to about 2.5 2.6 million years ago these old one Technologies since then we found out that um there's tools that date a million years older but anyhow at the Times what we know six years ago so we're going to start there and the idea was over 10 episodes starting at the earliest two and a half million years ago we were going to be on location where something important was invented or discovered or or figured out that allowed our ancestors to take another step or do something a little different and they're going to put us in that look location we were supposed to live for a period of about 10 days using only those Technologies to feed ourselves to you know house ourselves protect ourselves all those things and then um we go to the next spot over and over and we'd end up at 4 000 years ago in Oregon so we kind of we went through Africa went through the Middle East we went through Asia um and ended up in in Oregon at 4 000 years ago and it was mind-blowing you know these again there's there were certainly it's um it's television they weren't going to let us die right out there but what's I love I love about it is uh several things one is I hate I've been a professor for for 20 years college professor um and I hate standing in front of a room and even if I'm I'm knowledgeable about it I hate speaking about something I haven't experienced or done but here I am as an archaeologist trying to talk about what life was like 500 000 years ago you know how do you do that we had a chance to do it like we literally even though it was 10 days at a time 10 days is long enough to feel scared 10 days is long enough to feel hungry 10 days is long enough for us to feel uncomfortable but it's also long enough for us to feel nourished and and and and safe and comfortable and all those sorts of things um and it was mind-blowing so uh we made the different Technologies we used the different Technologies I spent 500 hours making our clothes for the different for the different episodes um we had an opportunity we had a team of 10 people fact checking things and you know back in New York City that every time we were going to do something or so you know they were fact checking making sure that this was something that was accurate and we had a whole bunch of specials who were brought in throughout the entire series to help out we had pictures on the ground all over the world that helped out um each time we went to a new place to film a new episode we got and this is kind of where the jumping off point for a lot of this anthropological work we later did was as a family we lived with um groups from that area for uh you know days sometimes a week or so to learn about the wild plants and which were you know which were poisonous which were good and um you know where the animals hung out where to stay away from these snakes and all those sorts of things so um that was a huge experience but also and I've been spending my entirely my entire life much of my life making these tools and using these tools in an artificial context right you know we're sitting here even if I was deer hunting with a homemade bow like if I didn't get the deer I could come home and order a pizza if I wanted you know I wasn't going to starve but here we were where we had to rely on these tools um these stone tools or these bone tools or these pots that we made or we had to make fire with sticks and if we didn't make fire with sticks then we weren't going to have fire on that night and it was it was such an educational experience a major educational experience for me but and I love the opportunity to for the first time ever on TV show many of these Technologies I remember there's a technology I don't know if I have them here to show you um the slave Outlaw technology which is about 250 000 years old it is uniquely Homo Sapien right us our species it was one of the first technologies that we created when we appeared on on the planet never before shown it's an incredibly difficult technology to reproduce and I had the opportunity to actually do it um actually I had a funny story about it but but do it on TV and in a way that you know it wasn't this boring like you know Dreadful documentary and everybody's exhausted and just listening to these people talking and you see charts and graphs I mean it was an exciting thing so um I remember when it was all over we would get I get all these uh emails and contacts from these kids I mean 10 year old kids that are talking about Homo erectus and the shooting hand axes and they're outside making forts in the backyard doing all these things I thought was brilliant I mean kids are saying Homo erectus and and it was awesome so it was a really um an important part of my life and a really important part of um it really nailed home for me and solidified the fact that this track of looking at our at our evolutionary past uh Technologies dietary change and all this was really really important yeah I think that that leads pretty nicely into the question of like okay so what what were what were you guys eating what were they eating what what's what tools uh they have and what was sort of the progression what did that do for us uh as as you know early humans and and our our progress into today that's a really good question so when one couple couple really quick things I think to to to preload that this part of the conversation one thing we have to remember is that our ancestors were not surviving and and that was one thing that we had one of the discussions or the um uh points of contention that we we had uh with everybody doing the show and producing the show and all this and us out there was that they did they kind of I mean it's Stevie they wanted to see us suffering I mean they wanted the ratings they wanted they wanted to see us pissy they wanted to see us cursing they wanted to see us wet and miserable and covered in bugs and all these other sorts of things and starving um in the reality and I kept saying that's that's not the right image to present that isn't the way that it was now first um listen don't get me wrong there were a lot of people that died I mean everybody at some point died in the over three and a half million years and a lot of people died very tragically a lot of people died because they starved and a lot of people were sick and um because they were malnourished but those were outliers you know I I I know you heard the story but let me tell it real quick because I think it's a really good point right before I got contacted for National Geographic um my students wanted me to be on Naked and Afraid and if anybody has ever seen it they take two people a man and a woman who haven't never met each other supposedly and they stick him in the middle of nowhere and the first time they see each other they're naked and they have to survive for 28 days and they have um a little necklace that has a microphone and they kind of self-fill most of it uh and and obviously they put a man and a woman together naked because you know for ratings and all this but the students wanted me to do this and I didn't want to do it for a couple reasons but one of the reasons is I'm a married man with three kids and I didn't want to do it but I didn't want to tell the students I didn't want to do it because it was embarrassing so I I wanted somebody else to say I couldn't do it and I could tell the students who's better than this than my wife she's going to put an end of this so I brought her up we were like in a bedroom or something we're talking and I said sit down please I got a question for you she says yeah I said you shouldn't have a show naked and afraid and she's like yeah man students want me to be on it and she's like and she first of all she started thinking and right away the fact that she started thinking then really worried like what are you thinking about right yeah he says about a minute or two later she said I think it'd be okay I said you think it'd be okay two things went through my mind one is I have no excuse for the students now and why is my wife think this is okay and he said listen you've seen the show you know as well as I do that even if somebody's going out there with sex on their mind after a day or two of literally starving and getting eaten up by bugs and ticks and covered in Poison Ivy and sunburn and all the other things and mostly all the other parts of it um the last thing on their mind is messing around she said she said I remember she said this is that would probably be the safest place for you yes you can absolutely go and so that's screwing my whole plan up but I thought about it I'm like you're absolutely right like you're absolutely right the story of our our evolutionary past is not one of you know australopithecines three and a half million years ago three and a half feet talls brain's the size of my fist just kind of Getting By and making it for three and a half million years and if it was that um okay no it's a story of spreading around the world increasing population size most importantly having the nutrition to support massive body and brain growth over time that isn't a story of our our species surviving right they're not naked and afraid that is that is a story of our species getting so much incredible nutrition into their bodies that they can support all of these things and continuing to do it better and better and better and better our our ancestors were not surviving they weren't even subsisting they were thriving that was the story I wanted to tell that so I don't think it came across the welcome so but that is the story that's the picture that we really should have in our minds so the tools that our Aunt to get back there to your um question the tools that our ancestors created were so incredibly powerful they weren't you know the kinds of you know they weren't microchips they weren't the space shuttle they weren't those kind of things but they were just as if not more powerful in in what they allowed our ancestors to do um and it really if you think about it very it breaks down in the tools and the Technologies they created breakdown into two major categories one is that they allowed us to overcome our physical limitations and access increasingly diverse and incredible resources from our environment and then number two once we had those resources that we couldn't just get with our nails and our teeth and our muscles or whatever once we had those resources then they these other Technologies allowed us to do something to those resources whether or not they were um you know something we were designed to eat in almost all cases they weren't we could convert them and transform them into something that we could derive incredible nutrition from so things like stone tools fire Pottery digging sticks butchering tools those are the kind of things that I'm talking about very simple very very simple but powerful because you know one of the examples I usually give is when we made our first stone tool 3.3 million years ago in less than a second you know our also pithy and ancestors struck two rocks together and created a edge a razor sharp edge that was Stronger and sharper than any part of our body and when it did get dull they could do it again and make it again in less than a second and that completely transformed our relationship you know with our environment but the other quick takeaway I think from from those two categories of Technology surrounding food and I think one that your audience would really get a lot of of abuse from is that almost all up until the Agricultural Revolution so everything changes at 10 to 12 000 years ago but for the entirety of millions of years almost every technology surrounding including the animals in our diets had something to do with getting the animal I mean our biggest issue with with having access to meat or organs or blood or fat or whatever is actually overcoming our physical limitations and getting that animal right that's the hard part right um so they created bows and arrows and that laddles and boomeras in Australia and uh you know the throwing sticks and those sorts of things boomerangs uh Nets and traps and fishing hooks and all of those things that we did to get the animals but once we have that animal all we need is a sharp edge and we can cut it open sure we can cook some of it if we want meat does seem to have a there's a little bit of a nutritional benefit to just a little bit cooking meat but otherwise um if you're if you have a dead end on one front if you want a sharp edge all of that incredible massive nutrition that's sitting there in that pile is not only safe but incredibly nutrient dense and Incredibly bioavailable all you got to do is start diving in so the Technologies for millions of years surrounding animals were about getting the animal plants completely different it's the exact opposite almost all the Technologies involved with including plants in our diet other than again basically maybe a digging stick to get roots or something sharp to maybe cut something off of the tree almost all the Technologies were about taking that raw material and getting it ready for our bodies because every single plant on this planet has toxins and even when they do have nutrition that nutrition is incredibly difficult for our bodies to have access to so the the there's been a lot I mean a lot of energy and time and and deliberate technological innovation uh trying to detoxify plants and make those the nutrition and those plants available to our bodies and I think that's a huge huge distinction yeah and that's and that's um another question too because that's something that that uh everyone has a hard time with now especially when we're pushing vegan and plant-based being like Oh my good no we're in the Garden of Eden we just eat this is this is the Bounty from God and this is just all for us and uh but this is something that's quite well established and you know botany and Horticulture and all these other things in fact that's just that's just biologically how plants defend themselves you know by by being toxic physically I mean they have other defenses as well but that's that's a major one um so when did people start uh you know sort of Dipping into uh you know the plant kingdom uh to start eating and obviously they had to had to to do more work to get that and I think I was um talking to um uh Josh Mickey bendor and he was saying that he looked at this from like a like a a economic point of view because he had a history in economics before he he did his uh PhD in Paloma anthropology he said like just economically like it doesn't make sense like why would he plants you get 10 times the return for your investment you know eating animals you know and so at what point did that that shift where we started started eating eating more plants or or how do we know like what what um what was the evidence for that well first up I love Mickey Bender's work I absolutely love it um and he's adding a voice to the anthropological community that really needs to be there um one thing I'd like to say before we dive in really deep into this is archeology is not a hard science right it's not like biology or chemistry or physics or anything like that I we are we have a lot of numbers we do a lot of measurements we draw things and have great graphs but at the end of the day every level of archaeological interpretation is um is a hypothesis right even down to how what a tool should be called and how it should be used and there's no way that we can take out um the biases in the archaeologist or the anthropologists that are trying to including myself obviously um when we look at an argue you take the same archeology and put it on the table and 10 different people could interpret 10 different things and there's a lot of there's a lot of um a lot of things can help create those biases right and a lot of it has to do with how the archaeologists themselves view the world a lot of archaeological interpretation there's a lot of amazing archeology taking place in the 40s and the 50s for a lot of different reasons in 67 obviously um it's not a very old discipline uh you know modern archeology really is about 100 130 or so years old and we've learned a lot we've learned a ton but a lot of the in the mid 20th century there's a lot of archeology being done and imagine I mean think about like Indiana Jones archeology and Anna Jones you know World War II um think about what's going on in the world at that time especially when we're talking about American archaeologists we have a lot of you know we have everybody had troops all over the world but America had a lot of troops over and we were planning these Victory Gardens I mean in the conscious of um the the country everybody wanted to do something to help the war effort what can we do if we can't go fight what do we do we have meatless stays and we have Victory Gardens we're going to help our sons win the war because we're planting carrots in our backyard for some reason but truly are our our conscious was really plant focused plants were helping us win the war plants were helping us through these things we were helping the war effort when we didn't eat meat in our house um and there were obviously shorties and these sorts of things as well and there's no doubt that the that mindset that way we viewed the world and what we should be eating what we should be accomplishing and all these other sorts of things made its way into archaeological interpretation and a lot of the standard texts and a lot of the archaeological um you know what resources that people go to were really written at that time some of the most famous archaeologists are from that time period and and plants became a huge Focus everybody was looking for who was eating plants and how they were eating plants and you know they were they were figuring things out like Optimal foraging Theory based on foraging patterns and we had Jill Gibbons one of the first you know forges who's writing about forging and in books that made it all over the world in the 60s and the 70s then we had the 70s where plants were huge Focus so you know for decades where the basis of a lot of the archaeological interpretation that you know forms what were taught in college classroom still today is from that time period still plant focused we were looking we were doing everything we could to find out how people were eating plants and we weren't giving enough credit to hunting they weren't shipping enough credit to animals so somebody like Miki Pandora's voice now is a strong incredible voice that's helping to you know even out that conversation um it's difficult to see plants in the archaeological record for obvious reasons because they're so incredibly um uh they can be destroyed so easily through natural processes we can see them though especially um we can see a lot of uh plant uh microfossils things like phytoliths which are a little um silica bodies that form plants in their um they're morphologic their shape is different depending on the plant they're from and they get stuck in pores of rocks um starch grains and other sorts of things that we can find um on on tools that were used to process plants but we're really only talking about going back six seven eight nine thousand years um with some of these plant microfossils and able to understand what they were how they were dealing with plants and and how and and what really how they made a difference in the diet so it's difficult to see plants back two million years at the time periods that we're talking about uh but it is but I so let's put that aside for a second what I do think we really need to understand is that and this is I eat primarily animal Foods I'm not full carnivore but I'm damn close to it and the plants that I eat I'm I'm making sure that I either anything that has a high talks about I can't deal with I don't eat and when they uh in other cases I'll either be detoxifying them or processing them properly but just before I start this next piece I want everyone to understand I am primarily an animal eater but I do want us to have the right right Vision in our head of what that ancestral dietary pastors like and and the role that plants played it wasn't that we were eating animals and then we started incorporating some plants here and there we were eating plants and bugs and then started eating meat but so we've always been eating plants but here's the thing the plant the plants that we were eating right by default and when we're talking about a time period where we had very low nutritional needs our bodies were small our brains were small and we had no Technologies whatsoever to assist us in getting food um and then to assist us in processing it before we ate it so we relied solely on our bodies so everybody listening imagine We Shrunk you down to three and a half feet tall every everything shrunk in proportion the only difference is that your guts would unfortunately be a little bit bigger your teeth would be a little bit bigger proportionally but other than that where you know muscles smaller all these things smaller and said go eat and with just your nails and your teeth and whatever um with no uh greenhouses no I mean there isn't anything no grocery stores there's no shipping from Argentina into you know another part of the world at a different season so you were forced by default to eat hyper seasonally and hyperlocal all plants have some sort of a toxin so those those that have toxins that um were too toxic to consume without processing were not even on your radar you couldn't touch them you couldn't eat from those from those resources so you were only eating the things that were growing there when they were available for you to eat them that had a low lower toxic load and they required absolutely no processing at all it's a very little amount of food the I'm convinced the most nutrient dense bioavailable Parts components of the diets at that time period were insects then you know that's Millions that's you know five million years ago seven million years ago then we hit three and a half million years ago we start making tools allowing our ancestors to butcher scavenges animals they're introducing meat and a little bit of marrow into or into into their diets which is fantastic um and then you know obviously things change we start to hunt and then we can you know we become the Predators and we have first access to the entire animal including the most nutrient dense bioavailable parts of blood the fat in the organs and that's when everything starts to change so um we were eating plants we were eating fruits paper seasonally hyper locally the lowest toxin loads possible which was very very limited it wasn't please don't get this image in your head that anybody listening that you when you walk into the produce section of the grocery store that's what it was like for our early you know gatherer ancestors it was nothing like that at all because there's no seasons in the grocery store the cool thing is when you're eating like that um and throughout our prehistory there's so many limiting just natural limiting mechanisms to stop you from uh consuming over consuming especially plants that have toxins that can build up over time um so even if there was a plant that had like something like oxalates in it for example you only have access to it for a week or two out of the year and you may be consumed you know something like some oxalates for two weeks and then all of a sudden you're not eating any for a certain period of time and your body has time to really so there's those sorts of things happening but now at nuts for example nuts we eat so many nuts today um because we can go to the The Big Box grocery store and buy a huge bag of shelled ready to eat nuts for ten dollars and you can eat them by the handful and if I said to you you know I think oh my God I'm eating this amazing keto diet and eating all these nuts and this is how people eat in the past two and this is fantastic it's nothing like how people ate nuts in the past if I said here's two rocks go out to that tree pick up all the nuts take the holes off the nuts shell all the nuts pick all the pieces out of the nuts and then eat the nuts you're eating a little bit like this for the entire day you're not eating handfuls of them so these limiting mechanisms that prevented our ancestors from getting really sick from some of these foods are no longer limiting mechanisms for us we don't have seasons in the grocery store anymore we we don't have that that localness in the grocery stores anymore um we're touting incredibly dangerous super plants as superfoods needing massive quantities of them and then making them super cheap and then we can eat them two or three times a day um you know for 365 days out of the year and causing all of these sorts of issues that isn't the way people are eating plants in the past um I am convinced you know the other the other cool thing about animal resources compared to plant resources is that animal resources are available all year round like all year round no matter where you are in the world now certainly animals migrate right um and it's easier to get different animals at different times right but animals in general are always available there are some changes right there are fat stores change um you know depending on the season and those sorts of things what's interesting about fat though is that visceral fat the fat it's like you know the stuff that we you know belly fat sort of thing that that does change throughout the season so a deer right now um here whitetail deer here in Maryland right now well a couple months ago would be very very lean right now they're starting to put on fat to get them through the winter at the end of the winter they're very lean again but a an animal will die of starvation before it eats its marrow stores I mean there's always marrow in the bones there's always bone grease in the bones which you can get out through boiling um so this idea of eating very lean animals in the middle of uh in or in a hot areas it's not true if you're accessing those other fats animals are available all year round plants are only available at certain times of the year when you're eating wild plants um and again that's different than the way that we consume at the grocery store today and they're poisonous and so that's a good thing they're poisonous and they're poisonous um so you talked about you know how we could look at residue on like the stone on stone tools sort of up a few thousand years ago several thousand years ago um is there that same sort of residue on the stone tools for meat they can be show that like this tool was used for meat this wasn't used for you know something else we weren't using this bow to hunt lettuce and things like that you know uh is there anything that could exists let me um give me one second I'm gonna grab something that I'm going to give you a little a little visual hold on one second yeah sorry I should have had something over here um this is and then you saw this um when we were at ketocon but here's an example this is a a resin cast of the first stone tool and I think it's important to show for a couple reasons but I can illustrate a really cool point for you too um so this was one rock it was struck this is a exact replica of the uh of the 3.3 million uh year old stone tool um rock of the right kind of material so like a flint or a shirt or obsidian this is actually so um struck right here and then this is the flake that comes off so this was this was the original first butchering tool the earliest one we've ever found at least to date um what I wanted to the reason I wanted to show you this for this conversation is that um you know these rocks are struck right they're struck and Pieces come off and there are um depending on the Rock and how it struck there's a part that's left behind and where when you take all these flakes off you you create these little fractures in the Rock sometimes like this you can see them but in other cases they're microscopic and these little microscopic cracks can collect residue uh if you're if you're using that tool to say cut a root um a lot of times starches can get stuck in there and then we can look at the starches and see what kind of is but if blood can also get stuck up in there and and we can use a couple of different tests to tell a if if blood is there and then there's also ways to look at that blood and see what kind of blood it was or at least in general a family of animals that that blood came from so yes we cannot it but again this is we're talking about these uh the ability to do that only goes back thousands of years it doesn't go back millions of years however there are ways to look at the bones themselves will um will preserve very well a lot of times the bones themselves can get fossilized so bones of animals that were butchered can get fossilized and then we can look at those bones and there's a lot of different ways to tell whether that animal was butchered whether it was hunted so for example and there's been a lot of studies done I actually uh co-authored um a paper for the journal what was the return of archaeological science I think where we were looking at cut marks that were left on Bones to tell that those bones were actually butchered so this by a human or one of our ancestors and not nod on by say a hyena right so this tool when you when you use a tool like this to butcher or even a knife when you go to Butcher there's certain places where you would expect to find these these butchering marks right there's certain places that you would um attack the muscle on the bone in order to get the muscle or or the meat off so number one the location of of where these these marks are helps us helps us understand that they're being butchered but also the marks themselves on our microscope we can tell if it was being cut with the stone tool or whether a hyena or some other scavenger was sitting there gnawing on it so that's number one number two a lot of times we find tools like this in association with the bones of of the animals and obviously it makes makes a lot of sense as well we also find uh we've done a lot of experimental work to look at fracture marks on Bones and we can look at a bone and tell when it was struck with another rock intentionally to open it up to so people could access the marrow in the bones for nutritional purposes same thing with skulls we can tell when skulls are being best on purpose with a rock in order to access the brains the other thing we can do is you know we study modern humans and we also study modern animals modern predators and look at how they hunt um and and when they when they go after a kill um what you know are they going after males are they going after females are they going after a certain age all the time and we have all these really nice um an understanding of the patterns of predators in general and when you see uh accumulations of bones in the archaeological record okay that is a natural accumulation made by a natural predator and then when humans hunt we hunt you know we don't do things necessarily that are always the most efficient or make the most sense a lot of times tradition or ritual are things play a role in how we make decisions and we hunt in very different ways even even people around here um they're people that know the trophy hunt for deer that will only kill a deer that has a huge rack on it so they can put it in the basement my son and I we hunt for meat so the way that if you looked at all the bones from all the animals that we've harvested the assemblage of them would be a completely different representation of males and females and ages than somebody who's who's trophy hunting so when we look at the assemblages of the bones we can tell a lot about what you know whether it was done by a human or an ancestor or one of our ancestors or a predator and what they were really targeting what they were looking for and what's also fascinating um and is that we can tell what people valued out of that animal right so so think about if you want something you killed a deer and all you wanted was the backstraps you love the back straps and all you wanted was the back strap so you killed the deer you cut it's incredibly wasteful I'm not suggesting anybody do this but um you kill the deer you cut the back straps off of the back and then you take them home well if those bones fossilized and you came and looked at that animal you know a thousand years ten thousand years from now you would see that every bone from that animal is still in place and still in the same place as it was when the animal died you might see an arrowhead stuck in the middle of it and that's it maybe you see some cut marks somewhere you know I cut along the spine or something where I cut those back straps out if I wanted the back legs right you would see will be left behind in one location is most of that animal and the legs the bones and the legs would be back at Camp they may be bashed open for marrow they might have been in a pot cooked for for bone broth you know and cut marks you know all over them or you would see that entirely most of that anime the heads cut off so there's a lot of things that we can tell looking at cut marks bones being bashed the assemblages of the bones themselves where they end up in relation to camp and other sorts of things that can tell us a lot about hunting strategies and how animals are part of the diet unfortunately blood residue on stone tools doesn't go back that far but I think we still have a really clear picture of hunting in the past yeah that's right and and again like you know no one needs an arrow to hunt a lettuce you know like you know yeah like these distance weapons like I mean what what is that what is that's not going to be to go after a stationary object you know oh but never and I love and I'm not trying to be facetious about it at all but the people you know you see that a lot of times people posting about it but nobody does a cave painting of of you know harvesting a wild plant they're always about hunts they're always about those sorts of things and it isn't that uh you know it isn't that people never do that right if you look at um the iconography surrounding maze in mesoamerica when maze is first I mean maze is a part of religion that's a part of every it's a part of economic it's a part of everything you see images of Maze and everything prehistorically um you know over the past several thousand years so it's not like you wouldn't expect to see plants on a cave wall if they were that important you know 30 000 years ago we just don't yeah and that's uh that's uh good to bring that up um because I remember you talking you told a story about about Maze and how like you know when Pro and this goes into the plant toxins and availability um as of plants as well and uh how when people were using maize they process it in a very specific way but then when people from Europe came onto this they was like oh that looks great and they took it back and they didn't process it the same way and they had quite a serious problem can you tell us a bit about that absolutely and and I love this story it's such a great poster child you know the the um the Mongolia Dairy fermentation thing I think is a great poster child for understanding the value of processing Berry um this story is really illustrates the value of processing plants in general but maze in this case and I think there's some huge takeaways here so Maize was first domesticated somewhere around eight to ten thousand years ago uh we we think we've nailed it down to the balsus valley of Mexico the wild ancestor to maze is just this little grass called teosente with these little with these little um seeds um that we're not really sure why anybody even started to pay attention to this plant I think it had to do with alcohol but it's another story anyhow um through the the the the interesting thing genetically about Maize is that it doesn't take um many steps to go from that wild ancestor to the kind of corner maze that we have in our plates today it's very easy to genetically modify um through selective pressure and it happened fairly quickly and became a major Staple in in diets in in mesoamerica and then the Americas in general South and North America as well over over several thousand years um it was the staple diet of many uh big civilizations like the Aztecs for example who not only ate massive quantities of maize but worshiped it and um and had entire economies uh built around it really just built around all of it and by the time in the early explorers came from Europe to the new world Maize had made it all the way from South America you know from mesoamerica down the South and also off to North so they encountered it fairly quickly now the term corn is a European term that just means green um so even though we call Maize corn today they called any grain corn depending on where they were so if they were in Europe I'm sorry if they were in Ireland and saw oats they'd call it corn if they were in England and saw barley they'd call it corn so when they came to the new world and saw the local grain being used maze they called it corn and it just kind of stuck um and it takes the corn tastes great corn tastes great it's filling it's incredibly easy to grow and we've talked about explorers coming from very similar latitudes so they could take this corn and literally bring it back to Europe and it would grow and they did they took it back and they took it back and corn did there what it's doing now um it really began to dominate the diets of certain populations especially populations that were impoverished didn't have really good access to food and it dominated the diets and when it dominated the diets it did it to the exclusion of the other Foods these people were eating so to preface this you have to understand that when Maize or corn made it over to made it back over to Europe the a lot of the people that adopted Maize is a major part of their diet did so to the exclusion of other things in their food so before the maze came they might have been hungry they might have even been starving they might have even been a little malnourished but they were they had whatever they could eat they were getting you know pieces of this and it could be rats and like plants that grew outside the door of their house but they were getting different resources different different nutrients and when Maize came in they could grow it in such quantity it was so incredibly cheap that they just ate corn right so when that happened you start to see a disease that followed Maize around Europe called pellagra it was first at least identified in a written form in Spain in the 1700s then it was identified in Italy not long after where it got its name palagra which means in Italian somehow some version with a sour skin and then it it spreads around Europe we see it in Eastern Europe around the same time that um it's kind of crazy but around the same time that a lot of the stories about vampires were you know people writing stories about vampires um we see it in Ireland at the end of the Irish potato famine in uh in the mid-1800s where um the U.S was setting massive quantities of maize as famine relief food and what was very interesting is that people that had access to this this maze were no longer getting sick and dying of starvation but they were getting sick and dying of this weird disease they never saw before um and then the the most recent major example of it is in the early 1900s in the American Southeast and States like the alabamas Louisiana Carolinas those areas were corn still today is a massive a major part of diets we see people getting massive in droves getting sick and I'm sorry I got a street sleeper outside it's loud we see hundreds of thousands of people um dying and millions of people getting sick I mean it was that big of a deal and we're talking in 1910s 1920s 1930s not that long ago so the the the you know our government our America the U.S we hired an infectious disease doctor by the name of Jeffrey goldberger he was famous and really well known infectious disease doctor and it was such an issue in the U.S in the 19 early 1900s that we we hired I said you've got to figure out what this is like this is this is crazy bad figure out what this is and he goes in and studies it and comes back and he says look you're right this is crazy bad it's nasty um but I'm not the right guy I'm an infectious disease doctor and this doesn't seem to be infectious I think it's food related and I think it has to do with corn you know I had these accounts in Italy and these other kind of things same kind of symptoms and real quick the symptoms are things like um red rashy skin initially um and then these sorts of lesions and other things just start falling off sometimes it was misdiagnosis as leprosy um bleeding from the mouth aversion to sunlight blindness and then eventually death and uh you know he said this isn't infectious and and our government came back and said whoa listen nothing this bad can be food related which right it it has to be infectious we hardly do a job go figure it out so he he convinced that it was um wasn't not infectious it had to do with corn so he took mental several mental institutions and several um uh prisons and he divided the populations in half and he kept one half on the diets they had which obviously were not great diets anyhow but kept them eating whatever they were and took the other half and fed them just mace and all the people that are not all but many of the people that he fed just amazed to started presenting with the same symptoms so we went back to this information and he still was met with the same resistance like go figure out what this is it's got to be infectious now certainly our understanding of infectious diseases in the 1930s is not like it is today but they did know that it could be transferred you know disease infectious diseases could be transferred by Blood through mucus and um and potentially even through food so he did he he had he brought people together and held these these things called filth parties this may this disease this pelagra was it really presented in in very poor areas because of the reasons I mentioned earlier and if somebody in your family got it it was embarrassing right um and you know people call you dirty and so anyhow it was known as the filth disease so he held these field parties gathered people around and brought somebody up that was suffering from it and he and his wife and his partner did three things and at every one of these parties the first thing he did was he took cotton swabs and he swabbed the person with the symptoms and then swabbed themselves with it um and all their membranes and then he drew blood from the person that was you know had collagra and then put it into themselves and then they took some of the parts that were falling off the skin and all this and put it in these little capsules and swallow them and finally people understood like okay if you've got it it's not infectious um what is it and he's like I have no idea but I think it has to do with Maze and then in 1936 there were a team of doctors that were studying uh uh a malnourishment disease in dogs called blue tongue um and it turns out this disease was caused by a deficiency of niacin in the diet and somebody was able to draw the link and they realized that this was because of a deficiency of niacin um and then our we did as a country exactly what we do with everything we put a Band-Aid on a much larger issue and said okay fine any baked goods have to have not be fortified of niacin so any you know anybody goes to the grocery store and sees fortified with niacin this is the reason why it is and you know what for the most part um the disease sort of of went away at least in this country in most parts of this country but here's the larger issue we have the consumption of maize massive quantities have made for almost 8 000 years with no archaeological evidence of palagra or anything like it as a result of it it doesn't show up until these European explorers took Maize back to Europe and that's when it shows up and that's when it persists and over several hundred years millions of people got sick hundreds and hundreds of thousands died as a result of this and even the ones that lived um the quality of life was terrible why what's the issue well the crazy part of the story is maze has nice and it actually has quite a bit of nice in it it's just that niacin is not available to the human body it's in a form called myocitan uh or niacetin that isn't available and it has to be turned into something else through through a process the ancestral process of processing Maize was this you take the maze you put it in an alkaline solution heat it up and let it sit overnight that's literally it so this was accomplished in over campfires the ash was the source of the alkalinity source and you put Ash in the water you put the Maize kernels in the water you'd bring it to a simmer simmer for about a half an hour take it off the fire and the next day you'd rinse it and you have a completely different food there's a lot of changes that happen um through that process one of the many changes is that uh the niacin gets turned into actual niacin their bodies can access um so that's number one nowadays we use something called calcium hydroxide which if anybody's in the pickling world it's the same thing as pickling lime it does the exact same thing and um on a larger scale people are doing it sometimes they use lye but the point is you bring it into It's actually an alkaline ferment is what you're doing the early explorers didn't take the processing back they just took the plan without the you know it took eight thousand eight thousand years of relationship with a plant is an incredibly um connected understanding relationship with that plant understand how to use it in the best way we didn't take it with us so here we have you know first of all I think the most ironic thing is that how many millions of people over several hundred years have suffered how many hundreds of thousands have died from a disease of malnourishment while eating massive quantities of the food that had exactly what they needed and it was just passing directly through them the other more modern issue is that maze is today still the most widely grown grain in the world and in certain areas it is still dominates the diet and only a small fraction of it is being processed traditionally and and real quick if you eat a real traditional Taco a real traditional tamale the word tamale is actually from the word nationalization um if you eat real grits if you eat real hominy then it's processed properly but in almost all cases it's grown it's dried it's ground up into like a cornmeal and then it's baked into something or put into something and we are having these conversations I mean right now we have a huge attack on meat in the world because we're trying to figure out how to feed the growing population and feed the world and doing all these things how do we do all these things to you know make sure we feed growing population we're not doing everything we can to make the most efficient use of the food we already have the most widely grown grain in the world the vast majority of it has nutrients that are passing through the bodies of the people that are eating it in most cases the bodies of people that actually need that nourishment more than anybody so I don't want to hear about GMO crops or new ways of farming or new ways of doing anything about Maize until we're taking Maize and putting it through this incredibly simple but powerful process now for most people listening Niche tunnelizing maze isn't gonna you know knock your socks off it's not gonna like change your life but that same story about Maize can be told a very similar story can be told for almost every food in our diets in the modern food system today that in the past there was some sort of a technology or Suite of Technologies or approaches to that food you used to make that food as safe and nourishing as possible and almost all the food processing today is at the expense of the nutrients in the food and they're more focused on making somebody else a whole lot of money on the backs of your health so the fact that your maze isn't metamalized in the fact that a whole Suite of these vegetables over here aren't fermented and the fact that we're only you know from an animal we're only eating the meat we're not eating the organs the blood or the fat you know you start to put all of those at the dairy isn't fermented you start to put all of those things together and this that is one of the reasons that we have such an issue today with with our health yeah and I think that that sort of knocks a big hole in the whole idea of like a raw food vegan sort of thing you know say like well if you're doing it right you're just eating the plants you know as they come from you know the Garden of Eden that they'll be fine but like like you say they have these toxins and they and they have these nutrients they're locked up they're not bioavailable to us we do we don't have you know the hardware to to extract those nutrients you know and um and obviously there's going to be you know many other types I I'm proud I was very surprised by the fact they were like injecting blood into themselves I mean that's that's playing with fire you know it's just like you know they got very lucky that they didn't have like some some serious uh cross reaction with blood types and things like that you know for sure yeah you know because I yeah they um that's that's interesting it's also interesting you know that they they proved you know the negative they're saying hey I'm gonna eat this stuff and I'm going to show you it's not infectious that's sort of that's sort of the opposite the the same process but for the opposite result um on how they showed that um helobacter pylori caused ulcers you know they were saying ulcerol is just stress it's type A personalities is this that and the other and uh this guy is actually from Perth um when I first came to Perth I was walking through the hospital I saw this posterance this guy he won the Nobel Prize for this like like in the 90s and uh he was saying he's like no I think I keep seeing this you know helobacter sort of thing I think this is coming from bacteria they're like nah you're nonsense this is this is well established this is from stress he's just like all right guys and so he took a while and he just drank it himself bam got like a stomach full of ulcers and they're like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah straight up yeah it's the same amazing yeah it's just yeah it's just you know the balls on these guys is fantastic you know that they can actually they should do that and and you know just to show that like obviously you know it's um it's uh there's only one sort of you know experiment he just did this and you know people could argue like oh well you know maybe you're just stressed out or something like that but you know it was it was you know uh reproducible you know they they did this if you you know they could do this again and again and so you know that's that sort of changed how we treat these things now it's a triple therapy two antibiotics and a proton pump inhibitor to reduce the acid and it works you know we get rid of we get rid of ulcers now but that was it it was the same thing so you just said yeah you don't screw you guys I'm just gonna do this and uh which is funny um and it also also sort of illustrates sort of the point that I that I you know sort of had an aha moment about a few years ago which was like you know these these diseases that we're treating are really not diseases you know that they're that they're um you know actually like toxicities and and malnutrition you know from a lot of events and that's that's a perfect example of that um and there's there's another example uh where we sort of were treating sort of the wrong thing in Japan I forget that I forget were calling it but I think it was like in sort of the 40s and 50s and they had this some weird disease everyone was getting sick they didn't know why it was like 10 years they were investigating this they couldn't figure it out the same thing it had a like they had a commission and they got um you know this this guy was you know very very well-known professor and they said you know figure this out and he was he was a microbiologist was like again an infectious disease guy but instead of um sort of looking around I don't know if this is I'm really the guy for this he just went right well let's go find let's go find a micro and of course you know a kid with a hammer the world's a nail and he's just like oh here's a microbe and we sort of see this in association so they spent the next 10 years trying to cure this this this microbe and then after 10 more years so it sounds like this you know 20 years or so they figured out that there was like heavy metal you know getting out of the factories like into the water and into the food supply and into the fish and everyone's getting like heavy metal poisoning it took 20 damn years to figure that out you know and uh yeah and so you know obviously you know they figured it out a bit before you know we figured out the niacin thing but it was a good illustration that we have these these things that we call diseases that we treat as diseases and uh and in fact there's just something very simple in our environment that we're just we're just doing wrong you know yep absolutely absolutely and again the here's another issue there's two major I think takeaways from this one there's a whole bunch of ones but one is the the the the role or the value in even a simple technology um that we require to take this raw material and make it safe and nourishing for our incredibly inefficient digestive tract so that's number one um number two we created that problem as well because if you went out and ate you know a little bit of the ancestor the teosente uh kernels even if you did along with the other stuff when it was growing and this that's not an issue but we've taken that and we've turned it into a mono crop and that we make it and unfortunately with seeds and nuts and legumes and you know cereal there we can dry them and store them all year round and have access to them in massive quantities every day if we want you know we've created an issue that wasn't necessarily um there before it and it just seems so natural everybody oh my gosh you know the farming and the plants growing in this these fields of wheat waving in the breeze that's this for some reason people's idea of Nature and it is one of the most culturally created things you could ever put your I mean it is as culturally human created and designed as a city you know it's City Skyscape and a field of wheat are completely engineered non-natural things yeah um I was going to say too um you know just just to jump back a bit you know we're talking about talking about all these tools talking about all these ways of of you know processing food and and obviously processing meat as well I think you know a major one is also you know going to be fire you know I I read a while ago that there was something like you know it was it was only like you know 790 000 years ago but I've I've seen since then it's actually way older than that you know what's the our earliest uh uh evidence of fire and and do we do do we know how we were using was it just cooking or was it you know like you know scaring off uh you know you know Mammoth over a cliff or something like that that's it that's about that's a really good question um so there are a lot of conservative archaeologists who will just you know if there's direct evidence for this time period then that's the only time period they feel comfortable for saying that it was around so we do have really really good evidence for 500 000 years ago 700 000 years plus um there's some direct evidence at almost a million years for five higher and when I say fire I mean the ability to start a fire it will maintain a fire and control its temperature and its light and then be able to put it out like so the ability to control the fire um so there are some people that would suggest easily at a million years there's others and this is where I think the real value my approach to archeology is is from somebody who's been trained in ancestral Technologies like I spent a large part of my life learning how to make some tools and how to make pottery and how to make fire by everything sticks together you know all those sorts of things and from uh people that are in in my using my sort of approach this Hands-On practical approach to understanding all the things that are needed to to form that relationship with those raw materials and that technology to be able to do these things a lot of times we you know take a step back and say it must be much earlier to get to the point of what we see in a million years it had to take a long time to get there too plus if you think of the other things that are happening at the same time and it's sort of a circular argument but I still think it holds water um where there's other things happening that fire must have been a part of um it's just that fire you know we're not talking about big fraternity party bonfires Scar the Earth that you can see forever we're talking about ephemeral little campfires that we're trying to find you know two million years later are very difficult to find um there's a couple of really good books on the topic uh Francis Burton uh wrote a great book about fire Richard Langham wrote a great book about fire um I I love Francis Burton's approach where she she thinks and I agree the control of fire started around two million years ago the ability to like I said started it will maintain it control it and then put it out is about two million years ago but she also says which I think is fascinating or suggests hypothesizes that to get to the point where you could do that with fire at two million years meant that we had been forming a relationship with fire for probably several million years before it now number one the biggest issue is humans are one of the only not the only but one of the only species on the planet that actually comes the fire we're not scared of it we don't run away you know there's some insects that come to fire because the light are drawn to fire things but in most cases animals run away and even it's our Instinct even humans to run away from fire so to get to the point where we come up to it and understand that it's warm and that it provides light um it took a very long time the ability to see that okay that fire is continuing to burn as there's trees in front of it but when there's no more trees it's not burning anymore um and understand and put two and two together say okay we can feed that fire by adding more fuel or adding more wood to it and then eventually figuring out a way to start it from nothing and create a spark or create an ember and turn into fire takes an incredibly long time there's no other um other than a a wild lightning strike or something like that in nature there's nothing that gives the information that we need or suggestions that we need in order to figure out how to do these things took a very long time um she suggests that you know there's there we would see a lightning strike a fire caused by a lightning strike um eventually go to it and I've been at control even in controlled Burns around here uh where they use fire to help manage Fields um these when the farmers around here do a control burn that first thing they do is they you know go through the fields and make sure all the animals that are living in there get out and even when they do that when they do torch the field and you see animals that were in there that they couldn't get out are getting out and then even after that we walked through the fields and there's dead cooked animals in there and on the ground um you know and so to see she suggests number one fire attracts certain insects and insects are a major part of the diet so that was a plus going in after a fire and seeing you know cooked animals that they could consume was a big plus and then the Heat and the light and all that so to answer your question more directly we're looking at probably millions of years of forming a relationship with this technology I think even there's no even though there's no direct evidence for Fire Control two million years ago I'm convinced we had it for a couple of reasons and then we just got better at using it over time here's one of the reasons and I think this is a good reason um prior to the ability to control fire several things um are important one is we really didn't have a very good way of controlling our microclimate right we didn't have a really good way of keeping ourselves warm now we're living in many of our ancestors are living in sort of Equatorial Africa at this time Niche and Africa so that wasn't a very huge deal but at when we started so we one thing fire does is control the temperature of microclimate it allows us to have light you know prior to having fire think about it our days ended when the sun went down like we couldn't we couldn't make any stone tools we couldn't make any rope we couldn't do hardly anything right to prepare for the next day we were done we could tell some stories and go to sleep that's about it so it offered light it offered the ability to cook detoxify Foods in certain instances and it also offered protection so prior to fire even though our ancestors for at least three million years between the time you know where have been walking upright from about five million years ago until we can control fire I've been walking upright um we don't think they were living on the ground at night that they were still sleeping in trees purely for protection but when we have fire that is a way that we can protect ourselves from some of the nasty animals that are on the ground and um there is some evidence that we finally come down from the trees on a full-time basis 24 hours a day we're actually on the ground because of this but here's the the big one I think it is around two million years ago just a little more recently about 1.1.8 million years ago that um our ancestors start to leave Africa and move north what's happening at the same time which sounds great okay fine I'm moving North a little bit no Northern latitudes we need a little bit more heat but at the same time we begin the last ice age so we have the last ice age starting at the same time that our ancestors some of them are moving into Northern latitudes you absolutely need fire you have to control the microclimate and that's one of the reasons I think it's there's others but I think that's I think that's the main reason so it fire is super important well that makes perfect sense too I mean if we're seeing people go up as I see to coming down then they're probably not going to do that too well without without some sort of heat Source yeah yeah um I always thought it was got a bit um interesting you know obviously like every every you know culture has like a fire myth you know and it's a very profound thing when we know a humans get it you know like the you know the I think one of the more famous ones is you know Prometheus and you know the Greek myth myth and the other one of the Titans Prometheus you know steals fire from the gods and gives his people ask Zeus first you know can we we should give them fire they're really struggling down there like this just sucks and they're like no no no can't do that you know because if they had fire then they could their power could rival that of the Gods and so he's just like yeah I'm gonna do it you know and so he goes and he steals fire he gives it to humans and this is just a revolutionary act you know and obviously you know Zeus was pissed but you know that that and you know shows up in in so many other other cultures about how this is this absolute just just you know completely just Epoch changing event you know and and then to think that that came like realistically two million years plus you know that means that these stories and that that sense of like you know someone's grandfather going like you have no idea how much it sucked Without fire you know and then that that that was instilled and passed on by oral tradition for two million years that blows my mind you know you make such a good good point and so the other I said a couple things that fire is good for there's two other ones that I want to mention one is it helps us to process materials we can create glues and do all sorts of fire hard and Spears and do that was great but we also tell stories around it I mean it it is fire anybody who's been around to fight if you haven't been around a fire get around them as soon as you can a good friend of mine Steve Watts who unfortunately passed a few years ago he was um that he's amazing and he's a great primitive technologist great experiment archaeologist he was he made all the stuff for the movie Castaway you know um he's he's amazing but he said and I I agree almost every actually every important decision made anywhere in the world up until recent times was made around a fire every single one of them every decision paid for anything was always made around a fire and and he really including storytelling I mean just it's mesmerizing to be around a fire I mean there's so many amazing things that that are important about a fire and one other quick thing I'd like to mention uh one of the images I had in my head when I started to learn how to make fire I wanted to learn how to make handrails and bow drills and all those things um and it was incredibly rewarding to learn how to do that but I had this image in my head you know of every time I needed a fire someone in the past needed to fire they'd get out their sticks and they'd do their thing and they'd make the fire um it's not very accurate that's what we do today right that's what we do today we light a match or we get a burner or whatever um I have a really good friend his name is Seamus Caulfield he's a awesome archaeologist in um in Ireland and he grew up in this little tiny uh Coastal Village in the northwest of Ireland um in County Mayo called Bill Derek and he grew up without electricity he grew up with that running water um and he said fire was departed my life every day that's where we got our heat that's where we got our light and that's how he cooked our food it was one of the most important parts of my life I was around it every day of my life and he said it wasn't until he was in his 30s that he saw a fire lit for the first time I said wait how can that be he said we it never went out it is easier to keep a fire going than it is to start a fire from scratch and they just you know at night they bet and they're we're talking about peat fires made from sod they would Bank the fire at night in the morning they'd open you know move it you know exposed to the coals throw some more peat on there get sticks or whatever get it going again he never saw a match lit he never saw anything done a later used um until he was in his 30s they kept the fire going forever and and I think that that is a much better you know visual of how people were using fire in the past than it is um to think they were sitting there doing hand drills every you know every day or twice a day yeah well it's like even like like the barbecue places like we were down in Texas you know like I saw somebody's evidence was just like there's been the same fire in this Barbie place for a hundred years and like when they had like a falling out you know and like they've split off and made two different places one guy like took some of the coals from that fire and went to the other one so it was still a continuation of that original that's fantastic I mean yeah it was great and um yeah I remember those those sounds because I you know I lived in Ireland for six years and um you know I remember like just driving through like especially on the west coast I I drove through a lot of these things sometimes I would just go through like see some little road off there and I had GPS so I'm just like I'm just gonna go I'm just gonna go see what's over here and and I'm glad I did because you you go into these little valleys or whatever it was just one road snaking through the thing with like six houses you know and it was just just nothing and no one forever and and then you I mean every now and then you just stumble across like a little village there's just like these Stone houses that have been probably the same Stone houses for just a thousand years more you know and like the Aaron Islands literally they had these houses that were you know 1500 you know some of the stone like uh ring forts were like you know 3 500 years old or something like that and and still in very very good condition so yeah and and people were living there not in the rainforest but like in the in the little houses and uh and that that must have been really really cool I think well I mean it may have sucked for them like compared but like I think I think it'd be pretty cool and um and uh yeah so I remember those and uh yeah that's really interesting you know to see that and I don't know about the fire like just never going out because you wouldn't you wouldn't expect that um no not not at all but he did that that I love obviously we grow up and I grew up watching westerns and I grew up reading these books and listening to all this you know and and you get an image of the world you get an and when P starts talking about the past you get an image so whoever your history teacher was had a really important job of of presenting you their image of how they view the past and some of it was great some of it was not even close and it takes a once you have an image in your head takes a lot to sort of change that image and the same thing like an archeology the image of plants being so important in the past it takes a lot to change that especially in people's careers you know our stake but I love those little moments where something uh uh something you see or a conversation you had completely transforms the way you look at something in the past and even something like the relationship with our ancestors with fire it was profound I mean the reason one of the reasons we're here today I I'm convinced is because we learned to hunt um one of the reasons we're here today the way that we are in so many ways is because we controlled fire um these are really important Technologies and and just to sort of maybe put a button on something earlier uh talk about technology is such a part of what I do and the way I view the importance of of what our ancestors are doing with their food in the past um these even though they're simple Technologies Stone tool production fire fermentation and pits in the ground and those sorts of things you know you putting Ash and water and and cooking maize those were transformative Technologies those technology those kinds of Technologies are what transformed the raw materials from our environment turn them into something our bodies could actually do something with and resulted in supporting body and brain change over time and eventually resulted in creating Homo sapiens now I realize that many people listening are not going to go out and throw start throwing Ash in their water and maybe fashioning their own bows and arrows and going hunting and nor do I expect anybody to but when we think about food processing today and how we can take lessons from the past and apply them to our modern lives one of the things I think we need to recognize is that the power of what we can do to where food happens in our kitchens now there's certainly an emotional cultural power of cooking with our families and our kids and all that without the doubt and that's very very important but the nutritional power is something that we have outsourced to the modern food industry and we should we should we should take control of it again and do it in our own ounces and it doesn't matter we're not talking about high dollar machines and and you know lab coats and test tubes and centrifuges and all these things we don't need that if we're talking about technologies that every one of us no matter where we are whether it's a flat New York City or a Big Country House in the middle of nowhere in the west of Ireland it doesn't matter you guys have a kitchens that are better equipped than the caves that our ancestors lived in and you can do the very things that you need to do to your food to make it as safe and nourishing as possible and the byproduct of it besides just nourishing yourselves in the best way possible is that you connect with your food in ways that you can't get from listening to a podcast or reading a book or watching a documentary or a cooking show if you will know more about your food through cooking than you ever will through in in any other way and that has been for any work that I did to get my PhD or any archaeological work I did or any of it the the biggest education I've had that has made transformation in my own life and my health and my families is what I learned in the kitchen awesome well I think um I know we're sort of running close to time but I think that's a good segue to the book like a human so can you tell us a bit about this and and you know you know what's in it and what you know what do humans eat yes so that that book is um when I was able to finally take um and merge together my archaeological work and anthropological work and and work with food into something that made sense and it was meaningful for my family that actually resulted in food on our table and an improvement in our own health um I I realized that this was something that I wanted to share as widely as possible so I start I started actually working on that book about seven years ago went through a bunch of different iterations but what I landed on and what it is is um the the first part of it talks about it kind of lays the foundation is contextual and talks about our ancestral dietary past from really a 40 000 foot view because it's hard to go through millions of years in in just a chapter but I think does a really nice job of taking a lot of information from different places or archaeological sources and making it make sense in sort of a timeline that allows us to understand that these are um this is a baseline this is something that we we can use to get information for how to improve my own health today and then the rest of the book is divided into different food types and I did there's meat there's Dairy there's Maize there's there's there's bread there are grains um there's insects there's those sorts of things and every chapter starts off with a little bit of a a prehistory and history of the the that food type in our diets and then most importantly goes through the different um technologies that we've used in the past and still use today to transform them into their safest and most nourishing forms and what I'm really proud of is it's filled it's got like 75 recipes in it so there's a ton of takeaways things you can do in your own kitchen with the most basic of equipment to um to make those raw materials as safe and nourishing as possible um and we have woven what I tried to do was weave in a bunch of stories about a lot of the work that my family and I have done around the world people we've lived with and lessons we've taken from them to help sort of um provide some you know sometimes comic relief but also some really good information from a lot of the amazing people we spent time with awesome well I think yeah well everyone should go check that out and uh and where else can uh people find I know we're just conscious of the time I don't want to I know you've got a meeting so uh can you tell us where to find you but your website and um and uh how to how to keep track of you and uh support your work absolutely thank you so much so um there's a couple of ways you can you can find out more about what we do and sort of follow us so my family and I we have a foodery called the modern Stone Age kitchen which is where we've we've actually taken that book uh just about every recipe in that book has made it into our foodery uh which is partly a place you can take it away and probably come and sit down and eat like a restaurant um and we're uh we're making all of that food plus plus a bunch of others where we have complete control over over the processing of the food the Technologies I've talked about so there's no two ingredients put together outside of the walls of of the modern Stone Age kitchen by our team um so we you can come here we're in Chestertown Maryland um and you can find out more about the modern Stone Age kitchen at modernstoneagekitchen.com and then we also have a non-profit called the Eastern Shore Food Lab which is where all of our education and teaching and Outreach can be found you can find out more about that at eat likeahuman.com and we have a ton of education is so incredibly important to us especially cooking that I mentioned earlier so we do a ton of online classes we do a ton of pre-recorded classes we do a ton of classes in person here in our teaching kitchen so if you're ever in the area we're not far from New York we're not far from BC we're not far from Philly or Baltimore please come check us out so monosunhkitchen.com eat luckyhuman.com and you can follow us on social media at Dr broshinos or Dr Bill Schindler and also at modern Stone Age kitchens awesome we'll put all those uh links up in the in the description and uh and encourage people every everywhere to to go check out your stuff uh Dr Schindler thank you so much I really appreciate it and you've taken so much out of your uh time out of your day and I really do appreciate it it's absolutely fascinating thank you for coming on it was my pleasure you're doing such amazing work anything I can do to support you thank you so much well thank you man I appreciate it all right all right guys so if you made it to the end thank you so much for watching I really hope you enjoyed that and thank you again to Dr Bill Schindler for coming on that was absolutely uh amazing talk I had a lot of fun uh speaking to him again as always um and uh if you like that you know please go check out his uh his book and his websites as well because he's doing he's doing really great work um if you like that guys please hit the bell and subscribe here on YouTube and uh you can also follow me on Instagram it's just Anthony chafee MD is my main way uh Instagram uh Channel and then I've also have a patreon that I'm getting started now it's again Anthony chafee MD and I have a lot of extra content bonus materials early releases of videos like this as well as a Discord Community where everyone can talk to each other and help each other out uh you know getting help healthy and eating optimally and we also do weekly Zoom meetings uh for like tier two and above and then we'll do a regular q a sessions as well for everybody so and a lot more so uh if you guys want to check that out please do it does help uh you know give me more time to make videos and do interviews like this so all right guys thank you very much really appreciate you watching I hope you enjoyed it and remember eat like a human [Music]