[twobitshifter]

The actual paper was posted yesterday but got flagged. I don’t dispute any of the evidence but I do have 2 points to raise.

1.

95,000 years is plenty of time for adaptations in diet. The development of adult lactase for processing dairy was famously quick. The human diet is today well adapted to other foods without causing severe reactions.

2.

The researchers note that our ancestors were primed to store fat for periods of fasting after consuming large prey. The evidence of this is that our fat reserves are larger than today’s carnivores. Yet fasting is more limited in today’s society than perhaps ever before. Obesity may actually be an expression of Paleolithic fitness that was selected for in those times.

[mkoubaa]

I would say 95,000 years is plenty of time to begin to develop adaptations in diet. If as a species our survival was still threatened by starvation for another 100k years we might see more adaptation towards meatless, but that seems unlikely.

[antisthenes]

It depends how much of an advantage a certain diet brought from a procreative standpoint.

If milk drinkers were the only group who could obtain the necessary amount of calories for bearing offspring and sustained existence, then the adaptation would happy much more quickly.

Perhaps even as quick as several generations.

[mkoubaa]

It's not quite as binary as that. Milk tolerance ranges from poison to healthy and everything in between.

[VoodooJuJu]

>95,000 years is plenty of time for adaptations in diet

Is it? Is it enough for all kinds of dietary adaptations? If me and my progeny eat grass for 95,000 years, will we adapt to be able to digest it?

On lactose: many of us carry the mutation that helps us digest lactose into adulthood (without any seeming issues). But does that make it ideal to consume? Is consumption of lactose into adulthood causing any issues that I can't readily detect?

[twobitshifter]

Yes if you eat grass and somehow survive to procreate you will have adapted to be able to digest it and sustain your species. Of course if you lack the genes you’ll die off and if the whole species lacks any genes and all that’s left to eat is grass, we all die. I believe from studying skeletons we know that agriculture first led to a decline in physical fitness and overall health - evidence that we weren’t well adapted at that time.

[hnthrowaway8493]

That's not how evolution works. The question to ask is, if most food sources except for grass disappeared, would humanity as a whole (through mass starvation and the resulting natural selection) adapt to be able to survive on grass within the next 95000 years? And the answer isn't necessarily yes; humans might also just go extinct.

[Daho0n]

>Yet fasting is more limited in today’s society than perhaps ever before. Obesity may actually be an expression of Paleolithic fitness that was selected for in those times.

That's pretty much what people say about the keto diet.