Along the western coast of South America, the powerful Humboldt current sweeps north from near the South Pole until its frigid water is blocked by a coastline of sandy plains descending from the high peaks of Peru’s Cordillera mountains. The resulting upwelling current helps to produce several months a year of rain-rich clouds and, in terms of sustaining sea life, is one of the richest currents in the sea. This food-producing confluence of geographic and oceanographic elements helped give rise to the great civilizations of Peru, whose ancient cities are thought to have supported up to a million people.
In the mid 1930s, Weston Price, interested in the effects of nutrition on jaw structure, was drawn to the area by mummies—some fifteen million of which had been buried in mounds and preserved by the succession of seasonal rains on the dry sand. Grave robbers had previously unearthed many of them, so on his arrival it appeared as though the objects of his intended study had come to greet him. “As far as the eye could see the white bleaching bones, particularly the skulls, dotted the landscape.”117 He was interested in those skulls because, at that time in America, from 25 to 75 percent of the population had some deformity of the dental bones or arches, and he suspected that rate of malformation was an historic anomaly.118 His visit proved to be illuminating. In a study of 1,276 ancient bones, he “did not find a single skull with a significant deformity of the dental arches.”119 What’s most striking about Price’s visit to Peru is that when he left the desert mummies to study modern city dwellers, he found the people’s structural symmetry and balanced growth patterns had melted away, replaced by what he described as “a sad wreckage in physique and often character.”120 The Peruvians had changed. Using anthropologic methodology (studying skull structure), Price showed that when a farming population adapts a city lifestyle, this shift can affect bone structure. But how? What was the root of the problem?
Price’s discovery was not entirely new. Physical anthropologists have long recognized the diversity of human cranial development, and the anthropologic literature is full of discoveries that link skeletal modifications to dietary changes. For example, when Native Americans migrated down the coast from Alaska to California and the consumption of animal products dropped, the average women’s bone size shrank by nine percent and the men’s thirteen within just a few generations. Meanwhile, brain size dropped five and ten percent respectively.121 Elsewhere, in South Africa, two distinct episodes of skeletal shrinkage occurred, one 4,000 years ago, the other 2,000. The first coincided with population pressures and the second with the use of pottery, indicating an increased
dependence on farming. In the intervening years, absent of farming artifacts, the skeletal size (including the skull and brain-space) appears to have recovered.122 And in the southernmost Andes Mountains, precisely where plants were first domesticated in South America, the fossil record again reveals “farmers hav[ing] a smaller craniofacial size than hunter-gatherers.”123
Not only is it a consistent finding in the anthropologic record that modifications in diet coincide with modifications in human growth, but there seems to be a general downward trend in size. That is, as groups of modern humans have moved from hunter-gatherer to agricultural-based lifestyles, their bodies shrink. Why would that be? Bioanthropologists, who consider nutrition in their studies, suggest that “our hunter-gatherer forbearers may have enjoyed such variety of viands that they fared better nutritionally than any of their descendants who settled down to invent agriculture.”124
The development of farming has long been thought to represent one of humanity’s greatest achievements, the cardinal technologic leap that would set us on course to living easier and healthier lives with every passing century. But this assumption has been challenged lately by both skeletal and living anthropologic evidence. It appears that the hunter-gatherer and herder-gatherer (like the Maasai), who lived in greatest harmony with natural cycles, may have enjoyed an easier lifestyle than all but a few of the wealthiest families today. In fact, Marshal Sahlins, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, calls hunter-gatherer-style communities (of old) the “original affluent society.”125 In his treatise on hunter-gatherer life, he paints an Arcadian image:
A woman gathers in one day enough food to feed her family for three days, and spends the rest of her time resting in camp, doing embroidery, visiting other camps, or entertaining visitors from other camps. For each day at home, kitchen routines, such as cooking, nut cracking, collecting firewood, and fetching water, occupy one to three hours of her time. This rhythm of steady work and steady leisure is maintained throughout the year.126
Embroidery? Entertaining visitors? Visiting your neighbors and trading gossip over tea? Though it might sound like something out of Martha Stewart’s Living, this is a fieldworker’s description of an average day in the early 20th century life of the Hadza, a nomadic band of hunter-gatherers who have lived in the central rift valley of East Africa for perhaps a hundred thousand years. Many other accounts corroborate the fact that the ecology in certain locations once provided more than enough bounty for the huntergatherer to simply sit back and enjoy, at least on the average day.
Hunting and gathering requires a lot of moving around, wandering from place to place chasing seasonal abundance. Farming, on the other hand, enabled us to stay put. Along the banks of the world’s mightiest rivers, on some of the world’s most fertile soils, societies grew larger and more stratified, developed more tools and technology, and embarked upon ambitious engineering projects like the pyramids. But there was a tradeoff. All the while, agriculturalists struggled to provide the level of nutrition to which their hunter-gatherer genes had grown accustomed. Over generations, this drop-off in nutrition would impair growth so that stature would diminish relative to that of their hunter-gatherer counterparts. You could say that, for the sake of developing agrarian civilizations, these societies chose to swap some of their vitality, toughness, and robusticity for aqueducts, large buildings, and other public works. Of course, if any group of people were to break away from city life and return to nomadic hunting or herding and gathering, they would reclaim the physique they’d given up; Their bodies would grow larger, and their skulls tougher and more robust.
This ability to adjust stature to better match a given nutritional context lends more support to the idea of an intelligent, responsive genome (as the operating mechanism) than to the suggestion that physiologic change depends solely on random mutation. If evolutionary change were dependent on random mutation, then it would be exceedingly unlikely that responses to nutritional change would be
so consistent and quick to appear. If however an intelligent genome had recorded in its epigenomic library which physiologic adjustments were most appropriate in any given nutritional context, then the epigenomic librarian (see Chapter 2) could simply read the instructions on what to do next. And this is why we see that “[t]hroughout the course of human evolution, features of robusticity like supraorbital and occipital tori [boney ridges], have been acquired, lost, or changed in different groups.”127
If you want to be poetic about it, you could say that the shifting and morphing skeletal and facial features represent the genomic artist at work. Each set of subtle skull feature modifications that have distinguished all the equally beautiful nationalities of human beings is a painted portrait, each one created using different nutritional pigments in varying proportion and displayed on the canvass of world geography. In this way, the intelligence in our genes has generated numerous variations on the theme of human attractiveness. The striking cheekbone, the slender waist and graceful legs, the delicate female chin, and the powerful brow of a dominant male face—all these universally desired features are tweaked a tiny bit to generate the continuum of anatomical variation that is Homo sapiens. But if you look at these anatomical variations the way Dr. Marquardt does and focus on the basic blueprint of our skeletal plan rather than the embellishments, you’ll see that in reality very little has changed over time. Though our statures and the prominence of individual facial features may vary, thanks to the genetically programmed growth preference for phi- proportionality, everything fits neatly together. Every part has maintained its functional relationship to every other part. Everything works. This is true of people living everywhere around the world. Or rather it was true. Very recently, something changed.
Which brings us back to Price, and those perfect skulls he found scattered on the Peruvian sand. On Price’s visit, he recognized that a precipitous drop in proportionality of Peruvian skulls had taken place in contemporary history. There was a key difference in the dentition of ancient and modern Peruvians (and up to 75 percent of the American population) that indicated a process entirely distinct from the nuanced skeletal variations present throughout evolutionary time. That difference: a loss of proportion. Why is that so significant? As we’ve seen in the preceding chapters, health and beauty are all about proportion. Disproportionality disables the body’s ability to function.
In Chapter 3 we defined a perfect face—and the bones beneath it—as a face that has grown in accordance with a mathematic formula called phi, which defines healthy growth in numerous species of plant and animal life. Dr. Marquardt, the plastic surgeon who discovered how phi-based growth occurs in the human species and created a mask to illustrate it, has shown us that balanced growth occurs in three dimensions, the X, Y, and Z facial planes. When that balanced phi-proportionality is lost, the resulting growth distortions lead to problems. In my own face, the loss of phi-proportionality in the horizontal (or X) dimension narrowed my skull so that my wisdom teeth didn’t fit into my head and had to be pulled, and my disproportionately sized eye sockets distorted the shape of my eyeball, forcing my lens to focus light to a point in front of (rather than on) my retinas, blurring my vision. A mid-face that is more severely narrowed than mine may pinch the airway, causing sinus problems. When skull narrowing affects the Z-plane (visible in profile), it may foreshorten the palate, increasing the likelihood of sleep apnea, a condition in which a person’s own soft tissues collapse inward and periodically suffocate them, causing fatigue, memory problems and heart disease.
Phi seems to be the universal template nature uses to ensure that optimal proportionality drives development, even under conditions of varying nutritional inputs. Over the past century or two, however, the typical human diet has diverged so far from anything before that our growth patterns can no longer adhere to the template. The switch from hunting and gathering to farming was accompanied by nutritional sacrifice, yes. But it did not block the ability of the phi-template to continue generating perfect proportionality. Why not? As I’ve suggested, modern historians have vastly underappreciated the value of traditional nutritional knowledge. I believe it was this wisdom that enabled people who’d
made the shift from hunter-gatherer life to settled life to continue to make (mostly) sound decisions about what kinds of foods they needed to feed their children and expectant parents in order to ensure optimal health. Though history’s most celebrated inventions—like trigonometry, plumbing, and the plow—helped give rise to the visible artifacts of civilization, none of this could have been possible had we been severely undernourished. The extraction of adequate nutrition from grains, for instance, required advanced biologic technology. These vastly undervalued strategies enabled growing populations to maintain nutrition adequate for healthy growth even after leaving the relative bounty of the hunter-gatherer pasts behind. And they did this by using the Four Pillars of World Cuisine.
The skeletal record evidences the success of traditional dietary regimes around the world—which universally include all four of the Pillars. If we were to create a visual timeline of the entire human story from nearly 500,000 years ago until today by lining up human skulls on one long table, we would find that, as Homo sapiens progressed, migrating across continents and oceans—some finding tiny, isolated islands to call home—all the while changing size and varying features, some skulls, like Paleolithic Homo sapiens, would be heavy and robust and others, like recently discovered Homo floresiensis, diminutive. But with every skull in our lineup, we’d see teeth well aligned and free of carries128, square jaws, and phi-proportionate construction in the X, Y, and Z facial planes. 129 This math is what gives rise to deep and wide eye sockets, powerful male brow ridges and delicate female chins, broadly arched zygoma (cheekbones), and all the other features anthropologists use to define a skull as belonging to a former Homo sapiens. These features would be clearly visible in every skull on our table. Until, that is, we walk to the end of the table where the lineup is still being built. In the skulls from the past 100 years or so, we’d see an abrupt change. 130
Of course, human skulls have recorded within their features every switch from farming to hunter- gatherer lifestyle and every migration from place to place. But our healthy and proportionate bodies had been maintained and protected as if under the aegis of a kind of nutritional Garden of Eden. So what happened to those skulls at the rightmost end of the table, the ones with the disfigured dentition and disrupted proportion? An examining anthropologist might conclude that we’d left the Garden for good, completely abandoning the diets that had protected us throughout history, and made a pilgrimage to the nutritional equivalent of a barren and inhospitable country. But what no anthropologist could discover by sorting through the bones is why? What nutritional sin had we committed?
The answer to that riddle can be found in the pages of a cookbook written over 100 years ago. You see, in order for a burgeoning food industry to convince people to make this journey—this exodus from nature—and to give up traditions with thousands of years of success without a battle, it needed to change the way people talk about food.