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The Evolution of Diet - Best of

(59 images)
It’s true: We are what we eat—or at least what our ancestors ate. The Evolution of Diet story shows how the human diet has changed over our long history, and how our bodies have adapted—or failed to adapt—to different environments and foods. Could eating like our ancestors make us healthier? Some experts say modern humans should eat from a Stone Age menu. What’s on it may surprise you.
Shot by Matthieu Paley for National Geographic magazine.
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  • Top row: escargots, sardines, and fava beans (Crete); naan in salty yak-milk tea (Afghanistan); fried geranium leaves (Crete); boiled crab (Malaysia); raw beetroot and oranges (Crete); chapati, yak butter, and rock salt (Pakistan). Middle row: dried-apricot soup (Pakistan); boiled plantains (Bolivia); fried coral reef fish (Malaysia); bulgur, boiled eggs, and parsley (Tajikistan); stewed-seaweed salad (Malaysia); boiled ptarmigan (Greenland). Bottom row: grilled tuna (Malaysia); cooked potatoes, tomatoes, and fava beans in olive oil (Crete); rice with melted yak butter (Afghanistan); fried fish with tamarind (Malaysia); dried apricots (Pakistan); grilled impala (Tanzania; photographer’s utensils shown).<br /> Food plates from all over the world.
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  • Young Hadza hunters survey the Yaeda Valley (below). Their families<br /> eat whatever game the hunters bring home.
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  • For the Hadza of Tanzania, honey is an essential, concentrated energy source as well as a tasty treat. Foragers like this teenager, Ngosha, find honey by following honey guides, birds that track bees to their tree-trunk nests. Then they light small logs or bundles of brush to make smoke to lull the bees, allowing foragers to get away with the honeycomb. Left image: After a missed shot at wild game, Kapala, a Hadza teenager, pulls out his arrow of an acacia tree.
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  • On top of a tree, Saitoti is getting berries, his breakfast for the day. Hadza are full time hunter-gatherer - they do not grow any food, herd animals or even store any food. When they get up early morning, there is nothing to eat in camp. They just head out in the savannah and feed from nature. It's a lifestyle we all had thousands of years ago - you too, reading this! The Hadza have been living in this area for approximately 40.000 years and have left no impact on their environment. Think about that.
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  • Two Hadza hunters looking for lunch with bows and arrows in the African savannah.
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  • After a day hunt, a man sleep out in the open. The savannah hold lions, giraffes and sometimes elephants among others.
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  • Wande and her husband, Mokoa, set out to find food. She uses a bladetipped stick to dig tubers, a staple food especially in the rainy season. He brings an ax to extract honeycomb from tree trunks and a bow and arrows for hunting and defense.
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  • Berries like these Kongolobe (grewia bocilor) are picked by the Hadza during foraging trips and eaten on the spot, rather than being collected to eat later. After chewing off the berries’ thin flesh, the Hadza spit the pits onto the ground, sowing seeds for the next generation of berry bushes.
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  • An aerial view of the Amazon jungle, home of the Tsimane. The Tsimane of Bolivia get most of their food from the river, the forest, or fields and gardens carved out of the forest.
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  • José Mayer Cunay, 78, looks for plantains ready to be picked near his chaco, a half-acre agricultural plot that the Tsimane elder and his son Felipe Mayer Lero created in the Bolivian Amazon using slash-and-burn techniques. Four generations of the family eat the fruit, corn, and other crops grown here, but the foods they prize most must be pursued: fish, fowl, and game. When hunters bag an animal such as an armadillo, they use it all, including the paws.
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  • Cutting an Armadillo to boil it. Following a full day in the jungle, Deonicio Nate came back from a successfull hunt with 3 South American coatis and an Armadillo. His family is preparing and eating the animals, a welcomed source of protein.
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  • Left: A Tsimane girl picks plantain in her family “chaco” (a field planted using slash-and-burn methods). | Right: Holding plantain cooked over open flames.
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  • At the Nate family family field, growing plantain and red corn. Tsimane practice shifting cultivation, using slash-and-burn technic.
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  • While the men are out hunting, the women and children of the Nate family sit around the fire in the outise kitchen and eat Plantain, the staple food, hoping for meat to be brought back.
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  • Following a full day in the jungle, Deonicio Nate came back from a successfull hunt with 3 South American coatis and an Armadillo. His family is preparing and eating the animals, a welcomed source of protein.
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  • Gutting a Coati. Following a full day in the jungle, Deonicio Nate came back from a successfull hunt with 3 South American coatis and an Armadillo. His family is preparing and eating the animals, a welcomed source of protein.
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  • Flood-driven debris clogs the Maniqui River shallows where Cunay bathes. A great orange tip butterfly, common in the Amazon, casts a shadow on his back. Even in old age – Cunay is 78 - most Tsimane remain lean from walking miles a day to gather enough food to survive.
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  • The 64 residents of the remote east Greenland village of Isortoq still hunt and fish but combine traditional Inuit foods with purchases from the super-market, the large red building in the foreground. A favorite dish: seal dipped in ketchup and mayonnaise.
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  • What’s not eaten right away will stay frozen in outdoor sheds; one family’s “freezer” holds the meat, ribs, and jaw of a killer whale and the fore flipper of a bearded seal.<br /> Greenland’s Inuit survived for generations eating almost nothing but meat in a landscape too harsh for most plants. Today markets offer more variety, but a taste for meat persists.
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  • The small Inuit settlement of Isortoq in east Greenland (left). A scene from a family fishing trip for arctic cod (right).
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  • A hunter goes out seal hunting on a kayak.
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  • (L) A seal, recently hunted, will soon be brought to the kitchen. An Inuit girl (R) feeds her brother a bit of liver from a seal their father has just caught.
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  • The head of a polar bear is set out to defrost on the dining table.
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  • After feeding his sled dogs, Bent Igniatiussen stashes seal meat in his basement for his family.
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  • A sled dog licks the dorsal fin of a killer whale. After Inuit butcher the game they bring home from hunting and fishing trips, some is used immediately, and the rest is stored in sheds. Later, Inuit use the choice cuts to feed their families and other morsels to feed their sled dogs.
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  • Her face dusted in bedak sejuk, a cooling powder made of rice and pandan leaves, Alpaida paddles out to visit friends in stilt houses. The teen and her family belong to the tribal group known as the Sea Bajau because they live year-round on their lepa-lepas, handmade houseboats.
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  • A Bajau fisherman clutches an octopus he speared after diving from his boat. Except for a dish made of ground cassava, all the Bajau’s food comes from the sea. A Bajau baby (left) naps by a pan of abalone that will be his family’s dinner.
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  • Left: A mother and her sons grab an early dinner of fish and cassava diner at the stern of her houseboat, or lepa-lepa. Large birds are kept as pets, much like we keep cats or dogs on land. Right: A coral fish is speared by a Bajau fisherman. The Bajau free dive, mostly catching coral fish. Fish such as tuna live in waters too deep to be hunted.
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  • A family cooking diner of coral fish, over a fire. Bajau family living all year round on a Lepa, a traditional houseboat.
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  • Tarumpit about to get lunch, diving from his dug-out canoe.
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  • Tarumpit spears a fresh catch.
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  • The Kyrgyz of the Pamir Mountains in northern Afghanistan live at a high altitude where no crops grow. Survival depends on the animals that they milk, butcher, and barter. Yak herd.
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  • A Kyrgyz man brings a tray of tea to welcome a guest.
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  • No, it's not make-up, and it's not retouched. Her cheeks burned by the bitter cold, Marbet, a 7-year old Kyrgyz girl, just returned from gathering the yak herd in her camp, in the middle of winter. With an estimated 50% child mortality rate, life is harsh up at 14.000 feet in the Pamir mountains of Afghanistan. (Left) A goat is slaughtered at a wedding.
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  • Bowls and cakes of kurut are spread out to dry. The product is made by boiling yak milk for hours over a low fire until it’s reduced to a paste, forming it in containers or shaping it by hand into cakes, then drying it in the sun. Once hardened, the dry cakes can be stored for use in the winter, when fresh milk is less plentiful. They’re steeped in hot water to rehydrate them. Kurut can also be kept in the mouth for hours, like a local shepherd’s chewing gum.
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  • A Kyrgyz woman strains milk with her hand, removing yak hair and other debris. Herders in the Shimshal Pamir, a remote part of northern Pakistan bordering China, tend their flocks. Yaks, goats, and sheep are fattened for months in summer pastures so that they can survive and provide food through the winter.
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  • Ayeem Khan wears boots borrowed from her father and the red veil of an unmarried Kyrgyz girl, to be traded for a white one when she weds. Twice a day she milks the family’s yaks; some milk curd will be dried for use in winter, when yaks give less.
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  • A yak has been slaughtered, Little Pamir, Afghanistan.
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  • Below the Altit fort and above the Hunza river, a woman tends to her potatoe field. In the old fortified village of Altit, over 1000 years old, Hunza region.
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  • In the remote village of Shimshal, Baba Jan’s family gathers together to prepare dinner: chai and chapatis sprinkled with apricot oil.
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  • A group of Wakhi women comes back from their daily excursion across the Hunza riverbed to gather fodder and wood for their cooking fires.
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  • Preparing a dinner of maltashtze giyalin (Hunza pancakes), to be served with mulberry syrup and a cup of rock-salted milk tea.
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  • Rubina Ismail and Yahyah Naig pluck and cook ducks in the village of Shimshal.
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  • Preparing chalpindok, chapatis drizzled with a salty sauce of kurut (dried yak milk curd) and butter.
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  • After breakfast, a woman in the village of Altit checks on her baby, Hunza, Pakistan.
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  • A kitchen in a home in the village of Aliabad.
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  • A blessed Cretan landscape : olive groves, vineyards and a winding road.
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  • Adonis Gligoris gathers parsley, accompanied by his children and a friend (left); fish from the Mediterranean, snails and vegetables from the fields, and wine from local grapes (right).
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  • Mediterranean breakfast of olives, oranges, pomegranate, nuts, dried tomatoes etc. Pyrgos village.
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  • Saturday lunch is a prolonged and bountiful meal at the home of Popi and Costas Moschonas, who live in the village of Meronas in central Crete. The family serves a homemade rose wine with dishes made using local ingredients (from left): stuffed grape leaves, an egg omelet green with herbs, and potatoes fried in olive oil.
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  • In the rural village of Moires, Crete, farmer Fanouris Alexopoulou prunes his olive trees in the spring so they will bear more fruit. That will provide Alexopoulou’s family with more olive oil, a source of income as well as a staple of their diet. In parts of the grove, the farmer tills the ground between the trees and plants potatoes, fava beans, and other vegetables.
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