Melissa McEwen's talk emphasized a dynamic view of evolution, showing a great number of ways that genomic, microbiomic, cultural and technical factors have all continued to evolve over time. Her talk brought home the point that humans are not living fossils of the primate lineage but are rather a very unique species, and that there is a great deal of variation among humans in the present, reflecting the many types of evolution that have occurred through our history and continue to occur as we enter from our present into our future. She got a good laugh from the audience when she facetiously suggested we follow some static "Cambrian" diet of 52 million years ago, a much more ancient diet than a "Paleolithic" one. This, of course, wasn't an attack on the paleo principle, but a tongue-in-cheek way of acknowledging that humans never stopped evolving after the Paleolithic.
What the term "Paleo" means is always "under review", assuming we are not just talking about the paleolithic period of history. As the author points out, there is a broader understanding of the concepts that is welcomed under the tent of the Ancestral Health Symposium. Chris does a find job of pointing out how these various factions in/around the paleo movement are finding common ground, lines of demarcation, and new avenues to which the paleolithic model of human behavior may be applied.
This would have been a fantastic event to attend!
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