Living Like It's the Paleolithic: New Research Challenges the Dogmas of the Famous Paleo Diet
A Paleolithic lifestyle, involving giving up grains, dairy, and processed foods, still has its followers — though new archaeological discoveries make things awkward for them.
By Łukasz Kwiatek
It's 1987. The biologist Jared Diamond — already a respected scientist and science writer, but not yet the author of bestsellers like The Third Chimpanzee or Guns, Germs, and Steel — publishes an article in Discover magazine (with a circulation of almost a million) that will change how a great many people think about the foundations of our civilization.
The article is titled "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," and it's about... agriculture. That's a provocation, of course — Diamond himself reminds readers that thanks to agriculture we populated the Earth, "built the Parthenon and composed the B Minor Mass," and that we ultimately owe all our achievements of the last 10,000 years to the fact that a handful of communities managed to domesticate a dozen or so species of animals and plants.
