 Welcome to Ancestral Health Today, evolutionary insights into modern health. Welcome to Ancestral Health Today, I'm Todd Becker and we're talking today with Mickey Bendur about how our Paleolithic ancestors ate and lived and what it means for modern humans. And Mickey received his PhD in Paleoanthropology when he was 67 years old, which is my age, and he's since made a name for himself, publishing and speaking for both academic and popular audiences. His paper, The Evolution of the Human Trophic Level During the Pleistocene, became the most cited paper in 2021 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. He's presented his work at numerous conferences, including several times at the Ancestral Health Symposium. And his recent book, Live Paleo Style, it takes a fresh look at how the mismatch between our evolutionary origins and the circumstances of modern society manifest, not just in diet and health, but more broadly in our social and emotional life. So today, we'll dive into the paleoanthropological evidence that humans evolved as hunters and meat eaters, and meat remains the food we're best adapted to eat for health. And as you'll hear, the evidence takes many different forms, including archaeological, anatomical, physiological and ecological findings. But we'll go beyond diet to consider cultural and behavioral implications of our background as hunter-gatherers and what that suggests for increasing human happiness and flourishing. So welcome to Ancestral Health today, Mickey. Thank you. It's a big pleasure for me. Ancestral Health was the first place where I lectured in the United States in 2012 or 11, I'm not sure. Yes, 2012, I think. I remember that. Very warm feelings towards the ancients, yeah. Well, yeah. So, Mickey, before we dive into your research, can you tell us a little bit about how you got interested in this? Because I understand you came somewhat late in life to this interest in human origins and ancestral diet, and you were actually trained as an economist and you worked in the corporate world. So what explains that transition? What got you interested in this second career in paleoanthropology and also in the paleo diet? Well, I actually started looking up to hunter-gatherers as a model when I was in university doing my BA in economics. And I noticed the difference between me and my wife in navigating, in finding things. And I related that to our genetic inheritance as hunter-gatherers. And when I retired, I mean, I retired at 52. I decided not to work anymore. And I don't remember what I thought about it before or after, but actually it's unnatural for humans to work for such a long time in six to whatever, eight hours shifts and getting paid for it. So the whole thing looked a little bit, and I had enough, just accumulated enough wealth to be able not to work. So I decided, why should I? Actually, I was working to increase my inheritance, my money that I would leave to my kids. And I thought it was enough at that time. So I decided not to work. And I was looking for things to do and came across a professor at Tel Aviv University who was very interested in hunter-gatherers. He was an archaeologist, but the archaeologists take a lot of analogy from hunter-gatherers of today. So I went to some of the courses. So you were interested in this, in the archaeology and in the lifestyle, but was there any connection with diet? Did you change your diet at some point? No, actually no. It started when I, after about two years of going to a university as a free listener, I decided to write a book about what I did, about actually that living work is an option. I don't think it was an option for everybody, but some people that can afford it should look at it as an option. And I started writing the book and for research, I heard about paleo. So for research, I started researching it myself. And I was writing, I had a very terrible ADD. I couldn't, I couldn't write for a long time or do any work for a long period without retelling. And then I did the research and I found out that retelling or ADD and gluten sensitivity are associated. So I stopped eating gluten and like after maybe a few days actually, I threw away my retellin and I was working without retellin. So I realized that I was eating in the wrong way all my life. And I became interested, more interested in the, in the nutrition side than in the sort of mental side of the mismatch. Okay. So there was some personal experience that made you think about diet and human adaptations, right? From your own personal experience with giving up gluten. Yeah. So let's dive into sort of the key themes that come out of some of your research, which I think is really interesting. And, but I want to start with the fact that, you know, we are primates, we're descended from primates. But some of our early primate ancestors, like modern, you know, apes and gorillas and chimpanzees, they ate a mainly plant-based diet. And somehow we, somehow later on the homo sapiens and before that erectus became meat eaters. So what happened there? How did we go from plant eaters to meat eaters? And, you know, what's the, what are the factors that drove that evolution? Well, apparently there was a already like seven million years ago, six million years ago, some environmental pressure that caused some of us to go leave the trees and start looking for food on land. I'm not sure what it was. I don't think anybody knows exactly what it was. So we became like, let's call it, one of the species like Australopithecus, which is well known, was actually getting food from the terrestrial sources, but most probably from vegetal sources. And then there was a change and more area became savannah in Africa. And savannah carry more fauna than non-savannah. So apparently these Australopithecus split part of it, went to exploit more vegetal source food. And the other half, which is actually homo habilis, started to consume more fauna, not fauna, but more animal food. And probably starting by just taking stones and getting marrow from bones that were left by other predators. And then becoming more and more sophisticated in that and starting to get some meat or maybe do some, you know, scavenging, but a little bit more aggressive scavenging. Okay. So you actually make the other predators run away. And it started developing stone tools. Stone tools first appear associated with meat consumption, with more meat consumption. And this is how we know that they started them. And of course you find the bones, fossilized bones in the. And this is like around homo habilis around two million years ago or so? Or when did this two and a half million years ago? Okay. About two and a half million years ago. Yeah. Okay. Two million years ago, 1.8, 1.9, we start seeing another a homo erectus, which was much bigger than homo habilis had different teeth structure, smaller, much smaller teeth than homo habilis. And that means that is the diet became much more condensed and much higher quality, let's say. And when you say quality, high quality diet is really in the end less fibrous because humans cannot, you know, exploit a lot of fiber. And you see much more bones and much more, it's quite clear today, although not everybody, whatever I say here, I must say, in the beginning, whatever I say here is not a consensus and it's not a unitary opinion. I have my own opinion. It's not that I don't have partners to that opinion. I do. But it's not like, you know, a total consensus. But my interpretation and other people's interpretation, especially the people who actually dig the sites in Older by Gorge, is that homo erectus was carnivore and a hunter. And in the sites, you find many large, very large animals. So this is the, let's say, the way that we got into this niche. So let's have you recite some of the evidence that really supports our origins as carnivores. And I know you've talked about physical anatomical features in the body, our digestion, energetics, things like this. What are some, what were some of the pieces of evidence that were most convincing to you? To me, yeah, to me, the physiological aspects are most convincing because this is something that, you know, it's almost impossible to interpret in other ways. When you go to a archaeological site and find the bones, one can always say, yeah, but plants don't preserve as well. So they must have had it in a lot of plants. But when you see that our stomach acidity, you know, still today, after 10,000 years of agriculture, you still the stomach acidity of not only a predator, but scavenger. So even more than the predator. And the reason it is scavenger is because humans were kind of scavenger, hunter scavenger because we took the meat and the fat to a central site. It's not what other carnivores usually do, especially social carnivores, they just get around the prey and they eat it. But we took the prey and we guarded it because the large prey we consumed over a few days or weeks depends on the size. So we actually were scavenging like scavengers on that prey. So we needed the high acidity to fight the pathogens. So this kind of thing. And then there is another very, you know, something that you will never associate unless you are in this business or biology. And this is the structure of our fat cells. So we have many small fat cells and other animals may have other what we have, all they have smallest, but larger, smaller number, but larger size fat cells. And that exists. Now, the researchers in this case found out that the animals that have smaller fat cells, but larger and higher number are all carnivores. So they're right. And this was in 1985. They wrote it means that humans were actually carnivores. Now, nobody picked it up at that time. But this is for me, it's the most and what the other things that I am guided, and this is probably because I'm an economist by by education. And I think that guide me very, very much is the energetics. Yeah, say more about that. I think that's that's really interesting. Talk about the energetics. Yeah, energy is the coin of evolution or the coin of life. Okay. This is a follow the money. So in evolution, I would say follow the energy. And if you look even today, or hunter gather recent hunter gatherers, because it is something we could not measure archaeologically, the energetic return net return on hunting is in the tenths of thousands of calories per hour. So in some cases, in some cases, it's 60,000. In other cases, it's a 10,000. But it's in that range. The return on the the on plants on gathering plants is around 141500 calories. So it's less than 10 times or more than 10 times that of hunting. Yeah. And the plants during the Paleolithic were not the plants we buy in the supermarket today, right? There was a lot more fiber. There was a lot less available sugars. We have these rich they lose a lot of calories by the preparation. Yeah, because you need to prepare most of the plants you need to prepare because we are not talking about fruits. Even fruits is maybe three, five, seven thousand calories per hour. It's not it doesn't get to the to the, you know, to the return on hunting. But it's not fruits. You have to prepare the sun, for instance, in Namibia. Yeah, they they actually, I think Magongo nut provides maybe 50% of their nutrition. But just to prepare it, they spend so much time and energy that the the original return becomes much, much less. So this is a one of the reasons why gathering it just doesn't provide. Now, this is not by chance. It's just because we are adopted to it. Okay. For for if you take primates, if you take, let's say chimpanzee, the ratio will not be the same. Because for them, they will not get the 10,000. Because for them to hunt, they have to run like crazy. Yeah, we have we've developed the tools to do it. So we are adopted in a way. This is it reflects a basic adaptation to hunting, as opposed to gathering. The tools, the the ability to run long distances, we could hunt in a way that other primates couldn't. So so that that gave us exactly to attack. Also, our bodies changed, right? So can you say what's the evidence from our teeth and our digestive tract and our jaws that show how this transition to hunting affected our bodies? Yes, I said, I already talked about the abilities and the difference in the teeth between the abilities and the and the erectus. We have this somebody built a machine. I think it costs like a million dollars. One of the researchers and the machine was like chewing. It could chew automatically and it could measure all the pressures here and there and that and that. And it came to the conclusion that human teeth were meant to chew meat. Because it holds the meat. Otherwise, if you take a if you take a homo habilis teeth, when it sure the teeth are flat, so the meat escaped to the sides and you cannot cut the meat. But we have we have tips on the on the on the teeth, cusps, it's called, that hold the teeth so we can actually cut it. So this is one of the adaptations. The the the classic one which everybody is talking about is the adaptation of the gut, of course. And when you compare our gut with the chimpanzee's gut, you find that the the colon, our colon is something like 77% if I remember correctly my calculations, shorter or the volume is smaller than that of a chimpanzee. And chimpanzee, it's a high quality diet. It's not it's not like a chimpanzee is not a cow. Chimpanzee eat fruit. And fruit is relatively high quality, but still it needs a lot of space, a lot of volume to be able to ferment the fiber and to get the energy from the fiber. So our our gut is built in a different way. We have a small colon, but the very large, relatively speaking, very large, a small intestine. And so we are built actually we evolved away from our ability to to extract energy from fiber. And we evolved to an ability to extract energy from fat and protein. So yes, we are not the gut is not built completely similar to that of of carnivores. But still it's much, much different than other animals that consume plants. Yeah, while we're on the topic of the efficiency of the digestive tract and and you know, the ability to get the energy from meat as opposed to needing this large gut for digesting of fibrous material and using the the the gut floor to do that. What do you where do you place the invention of fire and cooking in this because you know this book by Richard Rangham catching fire, he argued that homo erectus had the benefit of fire. Yeah, that allowed us to pre digest kind of you know, the calories and so we we again get more efficient absorption. So where do you place the role of fire and cooking in this story? You know, it's a good timing for that question because I just had I'm just I just sent for publication, a paper that actually claimed that the first usage of fire was to protect against predators and to smoke meat rather than to cook. And I made all the calculations again energy. Okay. So when you let's say you you go cooking. So if the energy is the net energy of gathering plants is 14 calories, 1400 calories per hour. The cooking what the cooking and it's in the 10%. Okay. And by the way, most of the calculations are made on the potential caloric value of the plants, not on what actually we extract from the plant, which is less than the potential. But let's say and the full potential. So what is it? So it's it increase your return from 1400 to 1540. So you know, it's a meager compared to a that's that's for plants. What about cooking meat just cooking meat in the same way? No, even less. Because if you take into account that cooking meat, actually meat, the return is much of it is on on on fat. Okay, because the the animals that they hunted contained 40 50% fat in caloric terms. So if you're so fat, you're cooking fat is adds something like 30% to the to the caloric value. But it but it doesn't reduce the work that the intestine has to do and allow us to have a smaller gut, for example, to be able to have cooked meat versus no. Look, it does buy a but by smart. Okay, maybe maybe the actual chewing, you know, the energy that you spend on chewing, maybe, maybe a little bit less. But you know, people invented the stone tools to cut meat two and a half million years ago. So you don't have to cut, you know, you can have like a Chinese do they cut it before they eat. And not with the teeth. So, you know, anyway, this is the paper. So if you look at the energy, now the energy, let's say you hunt an elephant or whatever, and you get a 60,000 calorie per hour to me to protect the elephant or to protect the animal. Yeah, if you don't protect, you will lose a lot of return of energetic return. And if you if you can smoke it and keep it, you know, edible for a longer time, you might you return your energetic return on the on the and the cost of fire because it costs to create fire, you have to go around, collect the wood and maintain it, etc, etc. So there is a cost also energetic cost. By the way, there is a paper of a researcher who did the measure how how much energy spent collecting wood, etc. And his conclusion is that it doesn't pay economically to cook. So it depends on the circumstances, of course, some areas have more wood than others, blah, blah, blah. But but anyway, so this catching fire and the whole hypothesis, you know, that the cooking made us human is is not correct. But I'm, you know, I must say that it's we are not far away. My my hypothesis is not far away from that. It was actually meant to to for nutrition, to keep us to keep us going. And yes, it demanded the higher brain power to collect the wood and make a fire. So it probably was one of the reasons that our brain grew. They actually making a fire. But it was not for cooking. Rangham, when he started, Rangham, by the way, he's a vegetarian. And when he started, his theory was, or hypothesis, was that it allowed humans to eat plants. Later on, he changed it. And he realized that meat was important. So it was meat and plant and met and he met some experiments, cooking snakes or something. But but his original was, and that I think he himself left this hypothesis. Anyway, cooking is not was not important, not important. Not that it's not important today. People cook and people, I mean, I'm not saying that people don't cook. There's a lot of other meat become sweeter and easier to chew. And you know, what have you. So yeah, yeah. Well, I want you to comment on another researcher, Lauren Cordain, who, as we all know, was one of the originators of the paleo diet. And he was looking at modern hunter-gatherers, you know, like the Hasda. And he, you know, his view, looking at this, was that, yes, meat is plays a role, but there's quite a wide variability and meat can be anything between 20 to 100% of the diet. Again, looking at modern hunter-gatherers. So what was wrong with this approach to and his conclusions? I don't think anything is wrong with that approach. You know, people can be, I'm, I'm, I don't claim that people cannot be healthy on plants eating, you know, a large portion of their diet as plants. Actually, what you see, if you go to the history, you see that at the beginning of agriculture, people suffered, but later on, they found ways to treat the plants and, you know, to ferment and to do things like that, to prepare the plants. And so they, they were quite healthy. My problem in that is that we don't do the preparation. Nobody does. Nobody ferments, you know, the food before you eat it. We count on the food that we buy from companies that don't care about our health. Also, if you take, let's say the Japanese, the Japanese, when they are in Japan, live to 90, 100. We have long life. Not all of them, but you know, traditionally. But the tofu that they eat is fermented like crazy. And so, and of course, they are also adapted. And I think the adaptation does continue. So, so they had like 10,000 years to adapt to their diet. And when they come to the young age, all of a sudden they become sick. Why? Because they don't eat the traditional diet. The fact is that none of us knows what we are adapted to. Because we don't have a history. We are all, you know, came from a non-traditional, my parents came from a non-traditional society. In traditional societies, people stay the same place in a small community. And if they eat something and somebody becomes sick, they quite quickly find the association. And they stop it and all they prepare it differently or they do, you know, Ethiopians in Israel, we have Ethiopians, Jews, and they eat, instead of bread, they don't have wheat there. They have teff. And teff, they actually ferment it for two weeks before they make the bread. Now, nobody's, I'm an economist. Nobody will invest in two weeks' worth of inventory here just for nothing. So it means that it was very crucial for their health. And this is, this is something that we don't do today. And we don't know our, our genetic composition in that respect. So I look at the whole mismatch, all, all the, this template is a safety template. And the safest food is meat. You just cannot, you don't have to prepare it. You just can eat it raw. You can cook it. You can do whatever you want with it. So that's why I, I, let's go back to the Hasda though, because I think you've pointed out that something that might have been overlooked by Cordain was he was assuming that modern Hasda were the same as ancient Hasda. But you've pointed out that the availability of large animals has changed. Can you say a little bit about your research showing that early paleolithic ancestors hunted very large megafauna and, and somehow that that, that availability has changed over time? First of all, this is even a consensus is that we lost a lot of megafauna. Let's say megafauna is defined as weight higher than 100 pounds. But we lost a lot of mega herbivores. Mega herbivores are defined as animals in weight higher than 1000 kilograms. So about 2200 pounds. And for instance, we are, we are adapted. First of all, you go to archaeological sites and you see, and by the way, this is what I do. One of my research focus today is trying to produce papers that measure the decline in prey size or all the change. But I find a decline between periods that were four or 500,000 years ago and 300,000 years ago. And at that time, this is like called the Shellian and the, and the Middle Paleolithic, let's say, or Middle Stone Age in Africa and early Stone Age, they call it. And I just had a paper, I'm also going to publish it hopefully soon, that in South Africa, in the southern Africa, the, if you go to archaeological sites, you see a less large mega herbivores. Then they were, you know, in the, in the 300,000 years, then they were 500,000 years ago. And again, in the next period, which is, you can, you can actually identify is about 14,000 years ago, what's called the later Stone Age in South Africa. You find another decline in mega herbivore. So mega herbivore declined. We found the same thing. We published the paper, we found it in the Levant, which is Israel, Syria, Lebanon. There are signs that it happened everywhere. So this was due to human hunters essentially caused an extinction or a significant decrease in mega herbivores. We, we were the driver of that change. Is that the case? That's another paper that I have. I tried to show, first of all, there is, you know, there is consensus around the mega fauna extinction, a wave of mega fauna extinction started about 50,000 years ago. It's called the late quaternary mega fauna extinction. There's no argument that that happened. There is a lot of debate whether humans contributed to it or not. And I think the debate is trending towards the one that think that human did it, because whenever, wherever they came, they went like America, Australia, some islands, you immediately saw a decline in this large herbivore. So I think there is still, you know, one or two researchers that are fighting against it, but most, most I think agree with, with that interpretation. A question then. So if we really did drive this extinction over tens of thousands of years or longer, did it have any implications for human evolution? Did it cause us to change or adapt? Because now we no longer had access to those very, very large animals and we had to start hunting smaller animals. Did that change anything about either our, our bodies or our practices? Well, that's, that's it. This is it. This is the unifying explanation that of all of human prehistory, all very like phenomena that you won't, wouldn't connect to each other. But when you start, when you put that precise decline and the adaptation to that decline, because we were hunters and hunting is what brought us, I mean, evolution, the need to get food is the, the, the main motor of evolution, right? Because this is why you call the predator carnivores, omnivores, herbivores. You divide animals by the way they eat. Yeah, because this is the main. So we were carnivores and we were a special type of carnivores that, and this is the next paper that I'm, I'm, I mean, almost completing it. The, the, we were a special kind of carnivore. We were a late joining, joiner. We just joined this group of carnivores because we were first, we came, like I said, from out of Stalopithecus, that was not a carnivore. And we are late cameras to this thing. And we could not adjust to consume a large quantity of protein. So we are, we can consume up to about 35% of a diet, 40% of a diet is protein. Whereas other carnivores can consume, can consume 80% as protein. Because then you have to remove some, you know, the nitrogen from the body, et cetera, et cetera. So we don't have enough, or large enough liver to turn it to rare. We don't have large enough kidneys to, to remove the, the urea. So, so this is it. Now, since we are hunters, we were like stuck with the need to obtain fat. Again, from an energetic point of view, because the alternative was to obtain carbohydrates from plants. But energetically, it's a doesn't pay. So we actually were like dependent on getting high fat animals. And the first high fat animals are the large animals, the larger the animal, the fatter it is. So we were dependent on large animals. This is why you find a lot of large animals in Homo erectus. And then when the large animals started to decline in number, we found another strategy and this is to hunt adult animals. Now if you take a herd, the adults have more fat than the young and the old. The young use the fat, they don't have enough fat to build reserves because they have to grow. The old, the teeth are going bad so they cannot feed well. So they don't have a lot of fat. So the adults have a fat, have the fat. So we hunted the adults. And this is what you find. This is an archaeologically very, very strong phenomena. But this is crazy. If you think about it, you are actually running after the most fit, the fittest group in the herd, right? They run faster, they are smarter, they are more alert. What predator will do that? Well, us because we are dependent on the fat. But the problem is that this is the age group that contributes the most or only the age group that contributes to the growth of the herd or to maintain the population of the herd. So the other thing that we did is to take and exploit only the fattiest part of the animals. And this is again something that you find in the archaeological site. So it's a wasteful kind of hunting because you take an animal but you use, exploit only part of it. And other predators do that as well, but they do it in times of plenty. For instance, in the Serengeti, okay, when there's a lot of GNU going around, lions don't eat the whole GNU. They eat the fattiest part and they go. But we do it in a time of shortage because we need the fat. And at dry periods, for instance, the animals don't have a lot of fat. So actually when they are most pressed, we add the pressure. Yeah, this drive to eat the healthy, prime adults, rich in fat that drove these extinctions. But then at the end of it, we've depleted the megafauna and we're left with smaller animals. So how did that affect human life patterns and evolution after we had depleted those? Also the smaller animals are running faster and they're smaller targets. So first of all, we had to develop the hunting weapons. And you see the hunting, the evolution, I have a paper on the evolution of hunting published, and you see that the hunting technology was aimed at smaller and smaller prey. One of the phenomenon, and this is the latest phenomenon in terms of adjusting or adapting to hunt smaller, faster animals, is domestication of dogs. Otherwise, why would people take dogs and have more mouths to feed than before? Dog is a very convenient aid because they can digest protein to energy. They don't need the fat. So we hunt smaller animals, we take the fatty part, we give the dogs the protein. Everybody is happy. It's a win-win situation. So we started domestication. That's a great explanation for the co-evolution of humans and dogs, that partnership. That's great. It probably started when we had a lot of protein waste in our camps and they came around and took it. The next thing is to start to domesticate something else, to domesticate the animals. Instead of running around looking for them, if you can build a fence and keep them in, the energetic return gets much, much higher. And by the way, the domestication of animals always entailed increasing their fat content. This was one of the aims of the domestication, according to Darwin. Later on, like 20, 30 years ago, there was a commission was, how can we decrease the fat content of the animals because fat is so bad? This stupid thing. The development of ruminants as herd animals and domestication of them, this was a natural outcome of the need to find fat and the lack of availability of wild animals. So the domestication. Right. It just increased the energetic return. And the next stage is the same. It's in parallel. It's domesticating plants. Now, some say that actually domesticating plants was to create food for the domesticated animals. But I'm not sure about that. But in any case, the end result is that the return, the energetic return on domesticating plants and animals is quite high and efficient for humans. Okay. So we can see our origins as hunters as argument for meat. We've adapted to that. But evolution doesn't stop. And as you've pointed out, we can domesticate animals. We can domesticate plants. We've had 10,000 years as agriculturalists. So if you're really a believer in evolution and the ability of humans to adapt, why not embrace the fact that we can be agriculturalists? A lot of folks in the paleo community insist that we should be carnivores, that agriculture is too recent and that we cannot have adapted to agriculture. But what do you say about that? Have we been able to adapt at least partially to agriculture? Tim Knox just published a book about all the good things that come with the catagenic diet. And in there, there is a chapter that I participated in writing that described the history of health and nutrition. And he came up with a paper that in Victoria, in the Victorian times in England, the life expectancy was at certain time of the Victorian period. Life expectancy was high and people were healthy. And if you go to a price, again, you know, he found societies that were healthy and were eating plants. Of course, they were treating the plants in a traditional way. And they were, like I said, probably genetically adapted to the specific plants in their environment. I'm not saying that plants are unhealthy by definition, they are not. They are healthy. If you prepare them properly, etc. And if you're, if you're genetically, if you happen to be genetically adapted, which I was, for instance, to to wait, I was not. So plants are not the villain by definition. Carnivore, I believe everybody that can, but it's not easy. Be a carnivore should do it because it's just very safe and very efficient. And you feel I feel I do carnivore. I feel great. I did paleo. I felt great, but I even felt better on carnivore. What can I tell you? This is like a personal anecdote. But I'm sure I share it with other carnivores. I read it. I see, I see from testimony. This is a good and maybe a point that's subtle for some people. You're not anti plant. What you're saying is meat is the safest. We have the longest adaptation to that, that we do have some adaptation depending on genetics and also proper preparation. We can tolerate and benefit from plants. So it's not anti plant. It's just a more of a nuanced view here, I think, right? Look, there are the people that live 90 and feed on your plants. They live to 90 or 100. You know, you'll find the old vegetarian or, you know, that everybody cited as an example. Some people adjusted to it. For instance, vitamin A. You need to have the genes to turn the plant form of the vitamin into something that the body can use. Do you have the genes for that? How many genes do you have for that? Et cetera, et cetera. So nobody knows. We don't know. You know, if you're healthy, fine, go ahead. Be vegetarian. This is very interesting, but I want to, in this last part of our discussion, turn to the behavioral and cultural implications of our evolution from hunter-gatherers. And I think this book here that you've just written is very interesting in this respect. You've talked about the social structure of hunter-gatherers and how being hunters, we worked in small groups. I think you said 15 to 50 people. That was our society. What lessons can you draw from these origins in terms of our social structure, in terms of what makes us flourish and makes us happy in these societies? Well, I've identified few things that I think still with us, probably genetically, that don't exist today and did exist when we were hunter-gatherers. And this is equality, is the first, and autonomy is the second. And those, now, that came out of the necessity to hunt in groups, right? Because, we weren't individual hunters. We teamed up to get the large animals. And so how did that lead to this flatter, non-hierarchical organization just coming out of the hunting and the gathering? What do you think drove that? I guess one other thing is, if you look at other primates like gorillas and chimpanzees, there is some hierarchy. There's an alpha male. It forces his will on the smaller guys, but that's different in the humans. So how does our mode of eating and hunting have a special structure? Yeah. Right. The equality came from sharing, I think. So, like we said, humans specialized in hunting large prey. So when you bring the prey to the camp, everybody feed on the same prey, although you hunted it. Actually, if you follow hunter-gatherer groups, most of them don't allow the hunter to determine who gets what in the prey. He steps away. It comes from, and also it comes from their concept that the hunter didn't do anything special. It's actually nature gave him, the animal, and nature belongs to everybody. So the possession, the feeling of possession does not exist. It's very weak. It exists, but very weak. So this is a principle, a very, very important principle, and it allows them to survive because hunting, one day you get an animal and maybe a week you don't get an animal. So you need to share the big pile of energy that you caught, need to be shared with the group in order to allow the group to function. And also small groups can't exist if there is inequality in the group. Is this true in other predators like canines and felines too? Do they also have this equality in sharing because they hunt in groups? No, no. It's different degrees of equality. For instance, in the hyenas are much more equal than let's say lions, dogs, there is the alpha male. It depends on the needs. It's a different setup. The business of creating new generations and how you get the best genes to get transferred. It's a mechanism that we have different because we came from a different line of animals. So it's quite complicated, but it's not the same. But if you go back to gorillas and chimpanzees, why do they have hierarchy and what made us give that up? They don't feed, you see, they don't share their food. They actually, each one, eat their own food. They don't even share it with the children after a certain age. So it's just not the same. They don't need to share because their food don't come in big packages sporadically. So they solve the problem of maintaining the group in a different way. Humans, because the big packages of energy come not on a daily basis, they have to share in order for everybody to survive. And sharing is just, you have to be equal, to feel equal. This is also a fact. When you follow hunter-gatherers, you see there are no leaders. I'm talking about... You visited the Haas to yourself. You visited other groups and you've seen this. Yes, I don't claim that I spent a lot of time. I was like a tourist. So I read much more than I saw. So I can't claim to be an expert trusting my own eyes, but I read so much about it. That was written by people who lived among the hunter. And there is no leader. So you mentioned the equality, but it's not an enforced equality. It's kind of a natural equality, spontaneous. You also use the term autonomy. What's the evidence? What do you mean by autonomy? And in a way, this is kind of odd because you think these groups are so tight that nobody can feel totally independent. So where's your evidence that hunter-gatherers had this sense of autonomy that they could do what they wanted? Yeah, I agree with you that there's some kind of contradiction there. Because I think that what happens is that you have the options, but you don't take the options in a bad way. In other words, you use the option only in a positive way. Because if you took the options and hurt the group, it would hurt your chances of survival. So again, the notion of autonomy comes from observations of researchers that spend a lot of time with them. They don't even tell the children what to do. I'm not talking about telling other friends what to do. I'm talking about telling the children. There is a famous story about a group in India where the government decided to build them a fixed place to be. They didn't want them to. Governments don't like nomads. So they built them a place to live and they wanted the kids to go to school. But the kids didn't go to school. So they came to the leader that they appointed. He didn't want to be a leader, but they decided they need one person to talk to. So they came to him and they said, you know, why the kids are not going to school? You have to tell them to go to school. He said, I can't tell them. If they want, they will go to school. If they don't want, they will not go to school. Or they gave them, they said, we're bringing new roofs for your village. Make sure that you collect enough people to carry the roof from the road to your place. At the day, he was there alone. And they said, where are the others? I couldn't tell them. I'm not telling them what to do. So this is the, this is the, when you want, when you want to go hunting in a group, you just get up and you say, I'm going hunting. And if nobody joins you, nobody joins you. And if somebody wants to join you, he says, ah, I will join you. Okay, good. Nobody tells anybody what to do. And this is, there's no bosses yet. People spontaneously participate. Now, the other thing you've said that's interesting is what, what research has found and what you've seen is there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of time put into work. There's actually quite a bit of leisure time. And that the amount of time needed for hunting and gathering is actually either just a couple of hours a day or you might hunt a week. And then there are several weeks of leisure and playing with the kids. This is, is quite interesting. So how are they really able to sustain themselves with so little work compared to what we do? This is actually the same with other accountables. If you look at the Serengeti, okay, you look at the lions, they spend most of the time just lying down. They then, then they, from time to time, they go and they get up, they go on a hunting trip and they lie down again. So in general, carnivores are spending much less time obtaining food than herbivores. Herbivores, because the food is not, is not, you know, high quality, contains a lot of fiber, they have to eat all the time. They have to pass, you know, through their stomach, a lot of food in order to get the nutrition. Carnivores less. And humans, which are at the top of the, of the chain, spend even less. And they have the technology, and this is what allowed us to invest more in culture, in making tools, in the teaching, you know, in transferring knowledge. So humans are, they don't work, but they're busy. I think you've pointed out this is really one of the real striking aspects of mismatches that we evolved really working a fairly small amount of the time, at least work being defined as going after food or our sustenance. And we had all of this extra time for leisure, culture, social interaction today. That's not the case. Most people work at least eight hours a day. Some people work more than that. Do you think that that drives some of the health issues and social maladies that we have, the fact that we're so much chained to work? Naturally. See, not only the time, but the hierarchy in work and the lack of autonomy. You know, professors don't resign that often because there's a lot of autonomy in being a professor once you reach the stage. On the way to professorship, you have to leak a lot of asses. But when you become a professor, the new level of autonomy is so high that I think this is the best job in the world. And the system is also not that hierarchical. But hierarchical systems and lack of autonomy create stress. The capitalism is such that it organizes the work. It organizes in a way that they will get the maximum output out of you in the time that you devote to work. And in order to organize, because we are all specialized today, there's a very, very detailed division of labor. Everybody specializes in something. You need a lot of hierarchy to manage all that stuff. All the specializations. I think this is really interesting. And yet, here we are in the modern Western world, dependent on technology, division of labor. It provides many benefits in terms of standard of living, health care. You can argue there, but there are some aspects there that really are beneficial. Infectious disease, for example, is controlled. We have access to things that our ancestors didn't. So there's benefits. But then you've pointed out we're giving up some of the benefits of autonomy, freedom, and social harmony. So how do we bring the best of our evolutionary origins in terms of social structure into a world that is specialized? Can we find a balance here? Is there a way to have both material abundance and high standard of living, but also the happiness and health and autonomy of our Paleolithic ancestors? I must say that I don't have solutions for the world. I can only advise something that also may work and may not work for individuals. You know, I'm a little humble. Humbler than I used to be, in that respect. First of all, I must say that I met a lot of people who like their work and who like the life that they have and are happy. So, I mean, who am I to tell them that they can be even happier? But I don't think they would. A lot of people that lived there were... I didn't call the book the book that you show is the English version of a Hebrew book that was written in Hebrew. And originally it was called Escaping to Paradise or Sneaking into Paradise, which meant living work is the way to sneak into paradise where you get your autonomy and you get your equality and you get... So, my solution, my personal solution was to quit, to do what I want. I work very hard. I work eight hours a day at least. You know, maybe some days I don't, but when I work, I work very hard. But I work at something that I want and something that they... I don't lose my autonomy. I have 100% autonomy. And nobody tells me what to do. So, it's not the work itself. It's the situation. It's the situation. So, professional. It's the situation and I think also the attitude. I'm somewhat like you. I work. I enjoy my work. I feel I have a lot of freedom and autonomy, but I still have to deliver. So, I think some like you and me are fortunate to be able to do that. I'm just wondering for the large, you know, majority of the population and because services and products have to be made, are there ways that we can build elements of this psychology into the lives of more people? Or is it always going to be just a few, right? Yeah. I mean, you know, some of them are obvious. Like, build yourself a community. Build yourself a community of equals. Don't try to be a friend with richer people, for instance. I have some rich friends. I used to have. I don't cultivate that friendship because I just don't feel comfortable. Sometimes I feel even intimidated in going to a house that is so posh. I feel uncomfortable about it. So, I have enough friends that are closer to me, economically speaking. Unless, you know, you have very special personality that you can actually feel comfortable among these people, or they have a special personality that make you feel comfortable around them. But otherwise, try to be close, try to create a neat, tight-knit community. I live here in the building with about, I think there are about 300 apartments. And we have like maybe six, seven couples that we are friendly with and that we meet quite often. And this is the most important group that I have because families are, my daughter lives in Victoria, in Canada. And my son doesn't live far away, but we don't see him that often. And now he wants to move to Cyprus. So, create yourself. You have to maintain and I say, even sometimes, let's say they don't provide the most, the finest intellectual challenge, yeah, all your friends, but they're important. They're important. And the important to meet people that you know, people that you feel comfortable to put your legs on the table if you want with. That I think is very important. Yeah, I think this is a really key point. And this goes back to the observation that we are naturally evolved to be in groups of 15 to 30 or 50 people. It's a group of known people. They're familiar. That's your community. We can have different kinds of communities, the ones in your apartment that are local, we can have communities of interest like ancestral health society, people we see on a regular basis. And this taps into this social nature that we have, right? And I think that makes, that's our our nature. Community is very important. Community, I think, for longevity, by the way, community is very important. I see, I see in Israel, the religious people, they live a little bit longer. And I think it is because they have a sense of community. Yeah, if you look at the blue zones, you know, the in Japan or in Greece, very much those social groups, particularly as people age, they're sticking together, right? They're not isolated and lonely. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. In the community. Yeah, some people try to argue that this is the a fabulous plants that they eat, but this is BS. The community and the knowledge that they have, how to prepare for etc, etc. This is the most important in the longevity. Yeah. And another thing that I want that I'm advocating in the book is spontaneity. Whenever you can, whenever you can, don't plan or you can plan a vacation a year in advance, of course, but try to get one that is like all the two days notice, if you have the opportunity to do it. So yeah, another, that's another thing that we miss compared to hunt together, the spontaneity. Spontaneity, by the way, is an expression of autonomy. If you're autonomous, you can be spontaneous. If you're not autonomous, if you have to go to work every day, 360 days, you cannot be spontaneous. You know, there's one other thing you wrote in the book I thought was interesting and that is, of course, you talk about paradise, but you know, even in these hunter-gathered societies, there were conflicts. There could even be big disagreements and some violence. And what you said that is what would happen. And when there were these divergences, the group could split and they were nomadic. And so one way of resolving disagreements is move away, form a new group. Absolutely. They move. They move. They move. If you look at the hats or the sun, they move. They don't stay. I mean, not all of them move, but people just move to a different, sometimes because they want to be with their friends and sometimes because they have some kind of argument. Argument, yeah. So that's another interesting lesson is, you know, if you don't like the community you're in, change or split off. Absolutely. Right, right. Well, anyway, this has been a great discussion, Mickey. Thank you for spending time talking about this today. And, you know, I think you've taken so many different pieces and put them into a unifying picture. It really is compelling. And yet you're modest about it. You're not saying you have all the answers. They're people with different views. But still, I think you make pretty good arguments, very persuasive ones. And you're always writing papers. The research isn't done. So can you tell the audience listening today? What are the projects you're working on now? What are some of the pieces of the puzzle that you're pursuing today? Yeah. You know, I have this theory, paper that I published in 2021, that says what I said is that it's a unified theory or hypothesis that most of our evolution is due to the decline, coping with the decline in prayer size. So this compels me to test the theory by first of all proving that prayer did decline. Because like I said, there's a consensus about the recent decline. But I'm talking about a decline that happened, started maybe a million years ago. And this is something that people don't know, don't realize. Some of them don't believe it. Some of them don't know about it. So this is something that I have to sort of investigate. Okay, if I was right about an early decline. And then I have to prove the collection. And then I so most of my work is geared toward and then, and this is the last paper that I'm very excited about. It hasn't been, it was not published yet. Let's see. Some papers are difficult to publish because, you know, there is the, in science, science is a social endeavor. So you have a lot of gatekeepers and a lot of people that with all kind of interests and et cetera, et cetera, and all kinds of. So some ideas are more difficult to publish than others. And I don't know how easy it will be for me to publish that, but that theory or hypothesis that humans were the one who were responsible not only for the late quaternary extinction, but for the earlier extinctions that I'm finding in other places. And why, because of the dependence of fat, we are the instigator of these extinctions. Great. We'll look forward to seeing some of these publications coming out. It's amazing you're staying active in this. And I think this is one of the factors that probably drives your longevity is this passion and continued interest. So it's great. Well, anyway, thanks for, thanks for talking today and thank you at, at future conferences. I tell you, you're a very high-class interviewer. Yeah, I mean, I made a lot, I did a lot of podcasts. And you must be one of the best. Well, you're too kind. I've, I've, I've enjoyed having you on. I always learn a lot every time we talk. So take care. Okay. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Ancestral Health Today. We hope you enjoyed our discussion on how evolutionary insights can inform modern health practices. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast to catch future episodes.