Challenge #42 - Capacity Part 3

The ancestral diet.

I like to look at nutrition from an ancestral perspective, as the way we ate ancestrally before the modern artificial influences of flying kiwi’s around the globe for us to eat in the middle of winter. The way we ate at the origin and majority of existence of our species is likely the healthiest way to eat, though I’m sure some will argue with that.  The earliest humans are estimated to have walked the earth about 250,000 years ago.  There are theories and speculation of how the human neocortex of the brain developed.  The theories range from alien DNA splicing to the combination of psilocybin from wild mushrooms compounded with controlling fire and cooking organs and red meat.  The idea that the psilocybin increases the neuroplasticity and neural tissue growth, and the cooked organs and red meat, including the brain, in abundance provided the right mixture of bioavailable nutrients to stimulate brain growth over generations. 

In the past, the human brain size peaked about 10,000 years ago and has been shrinking ever since.  What happened 10,000 years ago to instigate brain growth into brain shrinkage?  We’ll cover that later, but in short it was a change in diet.  For 240,000 years, give or take, we ate a certain way.  Then for the last 10,000, some of us switched…which caused our brains to shrink.