LogFAQs > #970494221

shadowsword87 posted...

Now that I think about it:
How do we know that? Is that just speculation of "old times were better because we were built for it", or because there's some actual poop archaeology happening?

The easiest thing to do is look at modern hunter-gatherer tribes and see how their diets end up meeting their nutritional needs, but I imagine there's also some archaeology involved. It's pretty intuitive, though: We spent a couple million years evolving around what we could forage, which covers a very broad range of different plants. That's naturally going to give greater nutritional variety than the relatively tiny handful of species we can grow (both as a matter of whether or not they're suitable to cultivate and the simple reality that a farm can only have so many different crops), even without getting into questions about selective breeding and other forms of genetic engineering that have shaped the crops we have access to today (perhaps most notably, giving wheat its incredibly high glycemic index). That's further complicated by the fact that our modern understanding of nutrition is very recent compared to how ancient so many agricultural practices are.

It's a strong enough effect that there's actually room to question whether or not agriculture was a mistake, though obviously that question is purely academic because we can't exactly revert to pre-agriculture now.