Dr. Zuk sets out to explore all of the ways that our preconceptions of the Paleo era may differ from how people really lived. I found the book as a whole pretty shallow -- some theories of paleolithic parenting, diet, etc. were introduced, but mostly it wasn't a very scholarly approach. Yes, it's a pop!sci book, but Dr. Zuk's popular works on entomology were much better. ( )

Interesting and accessibly written; a generally good resource for understanding the weaknesses of fads like the 'paleo' diet. But I'm not sure I was really the target audience for this book; I would have liked things somewhat less dumbed-down.

I was also frustrated by the tendency towards incomplete or underdeveloped explanations, carelessness in chains of reasoning, and analogies that didn't work. For example, in chapter 7, Zuk focuses on the hypothesis that it would be more evolutionarily advantageous for males to try to mate with many females; but the paragraph advancing this hypothesis ends by saying "Indeed, in many species the males perform a variety of activities that seem to have evolved to increase the likelihood that thye are indeed the only one to have mated with a female; in bluebirds, for example, males stick close to the female during the critical few days surrounding ovulation." This is not only not evidence that males have evolved to 'play the field', it seems to directly contradict the idea that 'playing the field' would be advantageous (because it would be incompatible with staying close to the female you've already mated with, to deter other males). But this hypothesis isn't developed in the book.

In other cases it's very difficult to understand what is being explained. In Chapter 5 Zuk claims that a gene, NAT2, which breaks down folate, would be advantageous when sources of folate are plentiful (because of ability to efficiently metabolise it), but disadvantageous when they are scarce. She tries to illustrate this latter with an anaology of "enlarging the holes of a sieve when the flow of water is decreasing." This suggests that NAT2 actually wastes some of the folate being ingested. But then why is it advantageous (rather than just not disadvantageous) when supplies are plentiful? And equally, if it just makes metabolism of folate more efficient, why is it disadvantageous (rather than just not advantageous) when supplies are scarce?

Issues like these occur frequently throughout the book, marring what is otherwise an interesting and very useful discussion. ( )

This is a confused book, the author would rather talk about human evolution but the hook is the caveman versus farmer argument. The author assembles a multitude of facts to bolster her case that we have continued to evolve since the conversion from hunter-gatherer to farmers and city life. Still interesting and full of valuable information. ( )

With a catchy title and a generous helping of strawman arguments, the author presents the case against the Paleo lifestyle with two main points: genetic changes can happen quickly, and there has always been great variation among humans.

But ultimately the book disappoints because it attacks a caricature "Paleo", the one you see in the comments section on various obscure fan blogs out there. This is one of the only books I've read that quotes extensively, not from respectable sources but from the anonymous commenters on blogs -- as though "Paleo Dude" represents the entire genre of those who think human evolution should inform the best ways to diet or exercise.

Lots of interesting new facts about ancient humans from an author who knows the subject well, but definitely not a good case against the ancestral lifestyle.
( )

(This review is of the audiobook version.)

Overall I was hoping for more, but it's all right as far as it goes.

On the good side, Zuk's writing is clever, wry, and often punny, which is a nice change from often-times very serious science writing. She's an accomplished scientist and clearly knows the subject very well. And it's about time someone took aim at all of those ridiculous paleo books, too. (Have you ever noticed how contradictory they are? We shouldn't eat cooked food, Because We Didn't Evolve Eating Cooked Food (though we did, and we have plenty of biological adaptations that only make sense with a cooked diet--but Zuk doesn't describe this). We shouldn't eat dairy products, Because We Didn't Evolve Eating Dairy Products. We shouldn't eat meat, Because We Didn't Evolve Eating Meat (according to one vegan I know, because we don't have claws or long canine teeth--seriously). We should ONLY eat meat, Because We Evolved To Only Eat Meat. And this is just diet. Basically, you can find any quack on the planet espousing a diet plan, and bet a million dollars that they'll be justifying it on a very flawed evolutionary basis. Drives me bonkers.)

On the less good side, Zuk does spend a truly bizarre amount of time deconstructing the arguments of anonymous paleo bloggers and commenters, as others have pointed out. The number of topics she covers means that the depth covered on each topic is fairly shallow. And she mischaracterizes [a:Sarah Blaffer Hrdy|157568|Sarah Blaffer Hrdy|https://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/user/f_50x66-e0ba3b90c110cd67123d6a850d85373e.png]'s work, which is criminal to me. Hrdy's [b:Mother Nature|788805|Mother Nature|Sarah Blaffer Hrdy|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1178365318s/788805.jpg|774794] and [b:Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding|6251387|Mothers and Others The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding |Sarah Blaffer Hrdy|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347821755s/6251387.jpg|6434265] were my first introduction to the work of intelligent evolutionary biologists, and she deserves not to have her work misrepresented. (eg. Zuk claims Hrdy defends the "sex contract" of "women stay faithful and raise children to guarantee men paternity, so they will provision the family with meat," whereas Hrdy basically demolishes it by demonstrating that in existing hunter-gatherer societies, only about 7% of a man's kill from a hunt will go to his own wife/mate and offspring--not enough to survive on.)

I can be more forgiving of the targeting of newspaper articles and blog comments, because her target audience is clearly not those who are already fairly familiar with evolutionary biology; she is aiming at those who receive their paleo-lifestyle data from newspapers and online sources. While she may indeed be constructing straw men to demolish, those straw men are, to my mind, a fair representation of the Paleo lifestyle as it exists in the popular imagination. So I expect it would be informative if you've got absolutely no idea who Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is, for example, but have a niggling suspicion that it's not healthy for human beings to eat foods made with flour.

As an added bonus, the narrator on the audiobook is great. She clearly had a lot of fun with the writing, and reads the book expressively and well.

If you're already fairly informed on the subject(s), I'd skip this one. If you're not, it's a good intro, but don't take what she says as gospel. ( )

Everything about this subject matter should be directly up my alley, and indeed, there were a number of sections that were fascinating. And yet still, for some reason I kept having to force myself to pick this book back up. Maybe I was just too easily convinced of the premise (that just because our ancestors may (or may not) have done X, that does not mean we should still be doing X now), so additional argumentation quickly became unnecessary.

The sections I found most interesting were generally those offering evidence for "modern" evolution of the human race. On the flip-side, if figuring out how recently an evolutionary change has happened is important, the science of how to make that determinations should have been explained less haphazardly. One technique was repeatedly described so vaguely that I was frustrated and distracted, trying to remember from my college genetics class 16 years ago why it should work out that way, until, two or three chapters later, a more thorough explanation was finally given.

I don't know, the paleo fad annoys me and I'm happy to be able to better articulate why, but largely I wish I'd spent the time reading Sarah Blaffer Hrdy instead. ( )

From my Cannonball Read 5 review ...

“A simpler life with more exercise, fewer processed foods, and closer contact with our children may well be good for us. But we shouldn’t seek to live that way because we think it emulates our ancestors.” - Marlene Zuk, Paleofantasy

There are a lot of different diets out there, some couched as providing quick weight loss, others purporting to be full-on lifestyles. We’re likely all familiar with South Beach and Atkins, as well as some of the old-school fixes (cabbage soup, cayenne lemonade ‘cleanse’). But one that’s gotten a lot of coverage lately is the Paleo or caveman lifestyle. The basic foundation of these recent movements is that we haven’t evolved for this life (eating dairy, sitting at a desk, consuming refined grains), so we need to adjust our diet to get back to the time when we were best matched to our environment: the Paleolithic era.

I try to reserve judgment of people if they are not hurting others. If what you choose to do works – either because of placebo effect or otherwise – then yay for you! I’m not, however, a fan of people promoting certain actions for reasons that can’t be supported with facts. If I tell you that a car will go forward when you step on the gas pedal, I’m correct; if I tell you it goes forward if you step on the gas pedal because of magical fairy dust in the trunk, I’m wrong. Even if the outcome – you trusting me that pushing on the pedal will make the car go – will be the same, the supporting evidence matters to me.

That’s why I found this book to be SO fascinating. Dr. Zuk is interested in exploring the claims many people seem to be making about what evolution can tell us about how we should be living our lives. It was a bit of a challenging read, but certainly manageable if you have a basic understanding of biology. She’s great at explaining things, although there were definitely areas that I had to re-read twice.

The purpose of the book is to explore in detail the oft-cited claims that we haven’t evolved for this life we’re living. She spends time building her case by talking about evolution of other species – including a really fascinating discussion of how quickly some crickets evolved to stop chirping because the chirps attracted some deadly flies – before addressing some of the main claims those who promote a Paleo lifestyle make. She tackles the dairy argument by providing evidence of how many of us HAVE evolved to process dairy (and why!). She looks at the caveman exercise model by pointing out that while the need for activity itself is supported, the idea that it needs to mimic chasing a mammoth is unsupported. She even takes aim at the “agriculture changed everything for the worse” argument. It’s fascinating and different from what seems to be pushed on a regular basis by many people who are promoting a specific agenda.

She also examines non-diet evolutionary biology issues, some of which she sees having support (attachment parents will like that part of the book) and some she does not (people who think women evolved to be monogamous and men did not may want to skip chapter seven). Those sections are especially interesting because those arguments – especially the ones around men and women evolving to be better suited to performing certain tasks – find their ways into daily life. Even political arguments from some conservatives (who ironically often don’t believe in evolution) are often based in this misunderstanding of how we have evolved.

My biggest take-away from reading this book is that there is not ‘perfect’ time that we’re best suited for, and evolution can happen much quicker (relatively speaking) than some Paleo proponents suggest. Dr. Zuk is NOT suggesting that, for example, eating fewer processed foods, or eliminating dairy, is bad; she’s just saying that the evidence for why it might be good to eat more whole foods or be more active is not necessarily found in how we lived 15,000 years ago.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who is interested in science, evidence, reason, and biology. ( )

Like lots of popular bio-science books, this is really a one-trick pony, but Zuk does such a nice job with illustrative examples that it's no problem to read the whole thing. The basic premise is that there is no stable "paleo" or "ancestral" period in human history or prehistory that we can use to explain our needs, urges or current problems. The environment of human life has always been dynamic and so has human biological and cultural response. We are always evolving, sometimes slowly and often quickly and the environmental challenges we face are part of that evolution. Zuk has a very readable style and makes fairly complex terminology not only understandable, but interesting. ( )

Entertaining rant (with footnotes) about how evolution is a constant, not a static thing and that a lot of the foundation of the so-called Palaeolithic diets and lifestyles are misinformed about how humans and diets work. My ancestors evolved to drink milk, others may vary.

There is sometimes more detail than I needed but overall worth a read. I'm still going to skim those palaeolithic books, they often have good gluten free choices. Yeah, my genetics dealt me an interesting hand.

Some of the ways she said things made me laugh "After all, nothing says natural selection like a brisk round of the plague." (p220) and "For example, sedentary living is clearly linked to poor health, but we do not have to emulate a mammoth-spearing caveman to remedy the problem. We just need to get up off the couch." (p270)

This made me think, from p 234: "Cystic fibrosis, for example, is the most common fatal inherited disorder in populations of European origin. People with the disease have thickened mucus in their respiratory and digestive tracts, leading to a variety of complications. Those with one copy of the cystic fibrosis gene, however, do not show the disease; and recent research suggests that the gene may have persisted in human populations because it also confers some degree of resistance to cholera, another often-fatal bacterial disease, spread via contaminated water." Ah, Ireland, where a great famine took down people and made them susceptible to Cholera, except those who pass CF on down the line to have a veritable epidemic on our hands... joy.

It's an interesting read, made me think but sadly several people who need to read it, won't. ( )

"Paleo." We've all heard the current health and lifestyle buzzword, it's a way to get in touch with our ancestral roots and live the way we should be living, the same way our Paleolithic brothers and sisters did. Why? Because as humans we haven't evolved beyond that and everything since the dawn of the agricultural age is killing us.

At least, that's what anyone on the Paleo-bandwagon would have you believe.

Fortunately, there are people out there like Marlene Zuk, people with the science and the patience to actually look at the facts and say, "No, that's wrong. Everything you say regarding humans and the Paleo lifestyle is absolutely not true." And it's nice to have some researched ammunition to use the next time my friend tries to convince me to "at least try Paleo."

Zuk has taken the Paleofantasy and completely proven it is a Paleofallacy (yes, I really wanted to make that joke). I often wonder how some people can believe the alpha male inspired bull that comes along with the whole Paleo schtick, especially the way they look at sex and relationships (humans were not designed to be monogamous, and other complete tripe like that). She also shows that, regardless of what certain Paleo buffs claim, humans are still evolving and evolution is not the slow process that many of them believe (also, evolution doesn't have an endpoint. We aren't baked goods, we don't spend a certain amount of time in the Evolution Oven until we are "done." It doesn't work that way).

Thank goodness for this book. It's a serious breath of fresh air. ( )

Very useful for beating some sense in food nuts. ( )

Uses recent research in evolution as well as pointing out some fallacious reasoning to debunk some of the myths that arise in using the presumed lifestyle of paleo era humans as a guideline for modern living.

A very readable and interesting book, in particular its descriptions of recent research. It compares favorably with Stephen Jay Gould's writing which I miss. The discussions of genetic drift and gene flow in addition to the more familiar mechanisms of mutation and natural selection were enlightening. Excellent discussion of how humans are still evolving and how human evolution is discernible in much shorter time frames than commonly thought.

"After all, nothing says natural selection like a brisk round of the plague." ( )

A solid look at some of the myths of evolution, particularly the idea that we are stuck with caveman genes in a modern world and are not properly adapted to our environment. The author does a good job with the task, and doesn't make a lot of "just so" stories. She makes a good case that we continue to evolve, and that we will likely to continue evolving in the near future. She also challenges the notion, prevalent not just among creationists but among a surprisingly large number of evolutionary scientists, that humans are the pinnacle of history. There is no pinnacle, just a series of steps along the way. She doesn't overreach the data to try and proclaim (as many of the paleofantasists do) that we know what our ancestors were doing in those millennia before we began writing; she discusses the evidence, and indicates spots where it is weak. Overall, a solid entry in the genre. ( )

Zuk does for paleo-lifestyle what Broad did for yoga in "The Science of Yoga" in that she culled the false unproven narratives, the marketing flare and the just-so stories to present the meat and scientifically proven merit of the movements. Pulling the curtain away we see the beneficial and the false in equal clarity. ( )

This is a fantastic book--funny at times, but serious about science in a very accessible way. Zuk is taking on the growing wave of "getting back to our cave-man selves", "paleo-living" gurus and enthusiasts, explaining just how things have changed. Basically, we aren't in a cave anymore, and there is no way to go back to that, not even close. The process of evolution is examined often in Paleofantasy, with plenty of fascinating details about the hard facts or strong theories of why things have changed as they have. She doesn't "dumb down" anything, but rather speaks in clear language and offers plenty of examples so that any reader can follow her through even the most cutting-edge science, helping us to understand what it is and why it's important. And certainly her sense of humor kept me turning the pages. Since I left college, I can probably count the science books I've read on one hand. This one really got my attention and curiosity, so I am highly recommending it to all of you! ( )