Paleo Diet and Fire
旧石器食谱与火
It’s been a while since my last update on the Paleo diet (perhaps a better name for it is ‘Post-Neolithic diet’). Here are the links to previous blogs on this theme:
自我上次更新关于旧石器食谱（也许更好的名字是‘后新石器食谱’）的情况到现在已经有一段时间了。这是我之前有关这一话题的几篇博文的链接：
http://socialevolutionforum.com/2012/08/23/an-update-on-my-so-called-paleo-diet/
http://socialevolutionforum.com/2013/07/20/adventures-in-paleo-eating-bone-marrow/
http://socialevolutionforum.com/2013/05/04/breadfruit/
As long-time readers of my blog remember, I switched to Paleo diet in May of 2012. Within two months I noticed an improvement in my health. After half a year I lost 20 pounds and my health improved dramatically. A number of chronic health problems cleared up. At that point, I made the decision to permanently switch to this diet, and I never looked back.
我博客的长期读者还记得，我在2012年五月转向旧石器食谱。两个月之内我就发现我的健康状况有所改善。半年之后，我减掉了20磅体重，同时健康状况大幅提高。很多长期的健康问题都不见了。在那时，我决定永远的遵循这一食谱，而且再也不会回头了。
Over the last year I noticed another incremental and slow, but real, improvement. I feel better than when I was 10 years ago. I became noticeably stronger – I can now easily lift and carry things that used to give me trouble before. More embarrassingly, people comment on how well I look. I am getting a bit tired of explaining the Paleo diet, over and over again.
在过去的一整年，我发现我的健康状况有了另一种持续增长的，缓慢的，但却很真实的改善。我比十年感觉更好。很明显，我变得更强壮了——我现在可以轻易地举起并搬运之前很难搬动的物体。更让人不好意思的是，人们总是夸我气色看起来有多么好。我都有点疲于一遍遍的解释旧石器食谱这件事了。
The gospel of Paleo diet is spreading. My wife has converted to it, then my mother. My secretary.Several friends and colleagues. I am not urging anybody to switch, but the results speak for themselves. On the other hand, none of the people whom I infected with Paleo had experienced as great improvement as me.
旧石器食谱的福音一直在传播。我妻子已经皈依了，继而是我的母亲，我的秘书，还有几个朋友和同事。我并不是在劝任何人转向这一食谱，但是结果说明了一切。而另一方面，在所有被我带动并遵循该食谱的人当中，没人经历了像我这样巨大的改善。
This can be due to my genetics (I have very few generations of Neolithic ancestors). It could also be due to the fact that I am simply not tempted to stray. When I am home, I stay strictly within the guidelines (no grains, no legumes, no dairy). When I travel I periodically get poisoned because I have no control over the ingredients.
这有可能因为我的基因（大概我的新石器祖先总共才没几代吧，呵呵）。这也可能只是因为我从不试图背离该食谱。当我在家的时候，我严格遵循食谱指示（不吃谷物，不吃豆类，不吃奶制品）。当我偶尔离家在外就难免被那些食物‘毒’到，毕竟我无法控制外面食物的配料。
Anyway, the real purpose of this blog is to discuss the book I just finished reading, which is very relevant to the Paleo diet (but I thought that an update on my own experience was due). The book is by a colleague of mine, Richard Wrangham: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. It’s a great book, and I recommend that everybody interested in human evolution read it.
总之，这篇博文其实是要讨论一本我刚刚读过的书，此书跟旧石器食谱非常相关（但我觉得是时候要更新一下我自己的亲身经历了）。这本书是我的一位叫理查德·兰厄姆的同事所作，书名叫《燃起火堆：烹饪如何铸就了人类》。这是本了不起的书，我推荐所有对人类进化感兴趣的人都读一下。
What I found most interesting in Richard’s book is his reconstruction of the dietary shifts that enabled the evolution of large human brains (which then made possible culture, living in large groups, language, art, science, and civilization – and who knows what else).
我认为理查德书中最有趣的一点是他对饮食变化的重构。正是饮食的变化让人类进化出了巨大的大脑（该变化同时也让文化，大型群居，语言，艺术，科学和文明以及其他数不清的事情成为可能）。
The first step, which took place 5-7 million years ago, was the transition from our chimpanzee-like ancestors, forest apes, to australopithecines that inhabited drier savanna-woodlands. Australopithecine brain size (in anthropologese, “cranial capacity”) was 450 cubic cm, compared to 350-400 cm3 in forest apes.
第一阶段发生在500-700万年前，这期间我们黑猩猩般的祖先——森林猿——开始转变成南方古猿，并开始在更加干燥的稀树草原上生活。南方古猿的大脑尺寸（用人类学术语叫‘颅容量’）是450立方厘米，相比之下森林猿的大脑尺寸是350-400立方厘米。
Incidentally, and as an aside, I find slightly amusing, but mostly exasperating, Richard’s dutiful translation of cubic centimeters into cubic inches. Americans, isn’t it time to grow up? Get used to metric units! Does it really help you to know that the cranial capacity of Australopithecus was 27.5 cubic inches? If I show you an object, will you be able to estimate its volume in cubic inches? End of diatribe.
顺带说句题外话，我觉得有一件略微有些喜感但又实在让人恼火的事情，那就是理查德坚定不移的将立方厘米转换成立方英寸。美国同胞们，是时候长大了吧？赶快习惯使用公制单位吧！你真的觉得将南方古猿的大脑说成27.5立方英寸更能帮助你理解？假如我随便拿个物体，你能用立方英寸估算其容量吗？好了，牢骚到此结束。
The food resource that enabled this transition was the underground storage parts of plants, highly concentrated sources of energy-rich starch. Parenthetically, that’s why potatoes, yams, carrots, beets, sweet potatoes, and taro are such great foods for humans – we have been eating them, or equivalents, for millions of years. Australopithecines dug these tubers, rhizomes, and corms (we are now speaking ‘botanese’) with sharpened sticks.
让这一步转变得以发生的食物来源是植物埋在地下的“储能”部分——那富含高能量淀粉的根茎。顺便说一句，这也是为什么土豆，山药，胡萝卜，甜菜根，红薯和芋头是对人类非常好的食物——我们已经食用这些或类似食物几百万年了。南方古猿用削尖了的棍棒将地下的块茎，根状茎，以及球茎（我们好像在说‘不丹语’）挖出来。
The next step was the transition to ‘habilines’ (such as Homo habilis) more than 2 million years ago: from 450 to 612 cm3. The big dietary change that fueled this increase in brain size was probably meat eating. Or marrow eating – see my blog on this issue.
接下来的阶段发生在200多万年前，南方古猿转变成‘人属猿人’（比如‘能人’），其大脑尺寸也从450立方厘米增加到了612立方厘米。造成大脑尺寸增加的饮食变化可能是肉类的摄取或是骨髓的摄取——请参见我的这篇博文(https://evolution-institute.org/blog/adventures-in-paleo-eating-bone-marrow/?source=sef)｡
After that, brain size in early human started growing in a really explosive manner. Early Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) had brains of 870 cm3. 800 thousand years ago Homo heidelbergensis (which could be simply a subspecies of erectus) had brains of 1200 cm3. That’s awfully close to the modern Homo sapiens, whose cranial capacity is 1400 cm3.
在这之后，早期人类的大脑尺寸开始爆炸式的增长。早期的直立猿人（180万年前）拥有870立方厘米的大脑。80万年前的海德堡人（可能只是直立人的一个亚种）拥有1200立方厘米的大脑。这个尺寸已经非常接近现代智人1400立方厘米的大脑尺寸了。
Where did the energy that fueled these oversize brains come from? Wrangham argues that it came from cooking. I find his argument quite convincing. Thermal processing of tubers and meats doubles the ability of our guts to extract calories and nutrients from these food sources.
支撑这种大尺寸大脑的能量来自什么地方？兰厄姆认为来自烹饪。我亦觉得他的论点很有说服力。对块茎和肉类的热加工让我们的消化系统从这些食材中攫取热量和营养的能力翻了倍。
The use of fire is securely attested at the Gesher Benot Ya’akov site near Jordan River, which is dated to 790,000 years ago. But here we have archaeological evidence of hearths, permanent fires around which human nuclear families would gather around every evening for the most important meal of the day. It is quite likely that hearths were a product of long evolution, with humans using fire for cooking well before the evolution of human family (which as Wrangham argues, was itself a result of cooking food – but you will have to read his book to find out the details of the argument).
现在已经确切证明了，早在79万年前，约旦河附近的Gesher Benot Ya’akov遗址中，火就已经被使用了。现在我们又有了关于灶台的考古学证据，核心家庭成员每天晚上会为了一天当中最重要的一餐而聚集在一堆持续燃烧的火堆周围。灶台很可能是一个长期进化的产物，毕竟人类使用火进行烹饪要远远早于家庭的进化（亦如兰厄姆所提出，家庭这一概念本身也是烹饪食物所带来的结果——但是你得去读他的书来了解这个论点的更多细节）。
Even if you buy Wrangham’s theory (which I do), it raises some questions. When did humans learn how to start fires? Remember The Quest for Fire, where the plot centers on this issue?
就算你同意兰厄姆的理论（我就同意），这其中仍然有些疑问。人类什么时候开始学会生火的？还记得电影《火之战》吗，整部电影的情节都是围绕这个问题展开的。
OK, it’s getting late, so I’d better end this post. But I can’t resist adding one thing. What makes Richard’s arguments particularly compelling is his ‘experimental’ approach to the questions he discusses. He has tried eating like a gorilla (he failed, we simply don’t have the guts for the gorilla diet). Another experiment he tried with his friends was chewing raw goat meat – with or without adding tough leaves. Sure, adding leaves produced better traction to reduce goat’s thigh muscle. But cooking it worked even better.
好啦，时候不早了，我最好给文章结个尾。但是我必须再说一点。让理查德的论证异常有说服力的是，他对所讨论的问题使用了‘实验性’的方法。他曾经尝试像只大猩猩那么吃（他最终失败了，我们就是没有勇气像大猩猩那么吃【译注：原文“gut”为“肠胃”与“勇气”之双关，按兰厄姆的观点，人类无法像大猩猩那么吃，是因为我们的肠胃已经适应了熟食】）。他和他的朋友所尝试的另一个实验是直接进食生的山羊肉——不确定是否同时吃一些硬的植物叶子。诚然，吃生山羊肉的时候加点硬叶子可以增加附着力从而分解山羊紧致的肌肉。但是把羊肉烹饪一下肯定更好。【译注：黑猩猩吃肉时会掺一些叶子一起嚼。】
So what’s the take-home lesson? Fire up that barbecue grill – we evolved to eat meat cooked over the open fire!
所以今天我们学到了什么呢？点燃烧烤炉吧，我们进化到要吃用明火烹饪过的食物了！
翻译：Dr啊（＠Dr啊）
校对：Drunkplane（＠Drunkplane-zny）
编辑：辉格@whigzhou