Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Climate and Diet of Early Humans About this episode Did early humans eat a paleo diet? Can we learn how to deal with climate change by studying our ancient ancestors? Neil deGrasse Tyson, comic co-host Matt Kirshen, and geochemist Tina Lüdecke explore the climate and diet of early humans.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we're going to talk about ancient climate change. Ancient as in during the time we've been human and maybe even a little bit of our pre-human ancestors. And what impact does climate change have on our diets? What did they eat and was it good for them? Okay, I don't have any expertise in this at all, other than the fact that I eat food.
0:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So we brought in an expert for this, but before we introduce that expert, let me show you my co-host for today, Matt Kirshen. Matt, welcome back.
0:56 Matt Kirshen? Hey, thanks Neil. How you doing?
0:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Dude, dude, are you still doing that show Most Likely Could Be Science?
1:04 Matt Kirshen? It's probably science.
1:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You know, I don't know why I cannot remember that.
1:09 Matt Kirshen? It's amazing. You're so good at remembering so many facts and that one seems to slip your mind every time. I don't, I don't know if you saw, by the way, my, I don't, you got a shout out from my co-host on Jeopardy last month.
1:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, really? Okay.
1:26 Matt Kirshen? Andy, my, the other Probably Science host had a, he did all right. He did us proud on Jeopardy.
1:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He was competing. He was a contestant.
1:34 Matt Kirshen? He was competing, yeah. And one of his anecdotes, one of his little bits of information was about the podcast and dropped the fact that you were at one point in his living room as a friend of the show.
1:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, excellent, excellent. So now I gotta remember it exactly. Okay, probably science. Very good, very good. So Matt and I will welcome today a, someone I met through someone else at the American Museum of Natural History, which it's an institution. Yes, we have astrophysicists there, but mostly they're like people who care about like cultures, anthropology, animal kingdom. And so there's a whole other place where I get some sort of osmotic thoughts about just what's going on in the rest of the scientific universe. And we have with us Tina Ludecki. Did I say that right Tina?
2:30 Speaker 02 Ludica, almost, but no American can, so don't feel bad about this.
2:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ludica, excellent, excellent. We have you on this show today because you are a geochemist and you're dialing in from Germany. You're a geochemist and you focus on reconstructing paleo ecosystems.
2:54 Speaker 02 Paleo ecosystem, paleo diets, paleo everything, basically. Yep.
2:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you're a Sherlock Holmes of their lives.
3:03 Speaker 02 Okay, yes, I take that.
3:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. Because they didn't have books for you to read about what they did. So you have to like piece together the artifacts and reconstruct what was going on in everyday occurrences, right? Is that, that's what you do?
3:22 Speaker 02 Basically, yes, yeah.
3:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so your current title is, let me read my notes here. You're a postdoc at the Sankenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Frankfurt, Germany. Excellent, excellent. And you're also affiliated with the University of Oxford over in England and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. How did I do?
3:47 Speaker 02 That is correct.
3:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did I get a B+?
3:50 Speaker 02 You do, yes. But it's difficult with all those things. I'm just about to switch jobs, so it's, yeah, it's not.
3:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Don't switch jobs, we just worked on this.
3:58 Speaker 02 No, no, from Sankenberg, from my main affiliation, I would say, from Sankenberg to the Max Planck Institute.
4:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, gosh, you were shifting, okay.
4:05 Speaker 02 You have everything, I'm just.
4:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Don't change job titles, because then, you know, we worked hard on this one.
4:11 Speaker 02 You did well.
4:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? For our sake. So, so tell me about your research, because we were at a gathering of museum colleagues and that's when I learned more fully what you were into. And I said, whoa, we gotta get that on StarTalk. And so tell me what your research entails and how do you piece together what ancient people ate?
4:34 Speaker 02 So basically, my main research lies on the reconstruction of four to one million year old South African paleo landscapes. So a timeframe we can't even usually cope if you don't have.
4:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Four million years old?
4:45 Speaker 02 Four million years old, my oldest samples, yes. Well, my oldest samples are twelve million years, but I will not talk about these here. So, human evolution, there, it's a really interesting time between four and one million years old, because a lot of things happened. You had a lot of different hominid taxa that lived, like, that coexisted, so they lived in the same habitat.
5:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, we say hominid taxa, okay, so you mean, so we are humans?
5:11 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
5:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, let me back up, just tell me if I got this right. When we think of rodents, we can think of rats and mice and dozens of other species within the rodent family, right?
5:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, are we in the hominid family, but we only have one species? Is that, is that correct?
5:32 Speaker 02 Right now, in the hominin, we only have one species. They, they, terms are changing there quite often, but in the hominin taxa, we are the only remaining species.
5:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so you're going back to a time where there were more than what we call humans as hominids walking around?
5:50 Speaker 02 So, we have Homo and Australopithecus, um, Pantopos, Adipithecus, for example, they all coexisted at some point in time and space, possibly.
6:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, okay. Okay, so, so, in the hominid family, or you said the, the, the word changed, just so I can be...
6:10 Speaker 02 So, yeah, hominid is basically, that would nowadays also mean, um, great apes, like orangutans or gorillas, chimps and everything, and all their ancestors?
6:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Matt, I knew an ape one time, and I thought he was a great ape. I thought he was a good...
6:27 Matt Kirshen? I, I'm still, I, I'm still sort of coming to terms with the fact that there were so many of them living at the same time, because, you know, I, I'm picturing the picture that we've all seen of the sort of, uh, the, the going from this to da-da-da-da-da, uh, you know, I, I'm, I, a lot of people are listening to the audio version, so they won't see what I'm doing, but you can imagine what I'm doing.
6:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Some linear sequence.
6:49 Matt Kirshen? I'm hunched over, and then I'm standing more and more. There we go.
6:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, and then you start crouching back over again, over your computer, yes, okay.
6:55 Matt Kirshen? Yep, which is what I'm doing right now.
6:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Full evolution of it all.
6:58 Speaker 02 But it wasn't that linear, so basically, that's why we don't even...
7:01 Matt Kirshen? And then we end up as just brains in jars.
7:04 Speaker 02 Brains and jaws are really important.
7:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But yeah, it's very important, Tina, you're saying it was not linear. So there are times when multiple homo species were coexisting. And that's hard to picture because look how tribalized we are just as one species. Imagine if there are other hominids walking around. I mean, I can't even picture what we, how we treat each other.
7:26 Speaker 02 And we call it even not a family tree really anymore. But many people like to call it a family bush, basically, because there are so many branches. And then, of course, new species evolved, others went extinct. So you have the come and go of many species.
7:39 Matt Kirshen? Two of them became president, one tried and failed.
7:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, all right, so, so this is before what we would consider today as anatomically accurate humans.
7:53 Speaker 02 Modern humans, you would say, yes, yes.
7:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Modern humans, sorry, okay. Okay, so now, so this is the paleo era. Okay, that's cool. So now, what did you find?
8:00 Speaker 02 So, so basically, I, I tried to reconstruct how paleo environment changed. So how did the landscape, the habitat in African thing change over time? And with that, like, how did the hominins in it change? Especially their diet, which is the main driver for evolution, of course. Like, the energy you put in, you can use for something, basically. So, and as a geochemist, my favorite tools are stable isotop systems. So I work with isotopes, which means I, basically, different isotopes of different elements can like fingerprint different settings, different environmental proxies, or what somebody ate. So I look at carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen.
8:40 Speaker 02 And for example, carbon isotop systems can tell me what kind of plant was growing on a site or what kind of plant an animal ate, also early human, for example, ate.
8:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I think, I think Whole Foods now has an isotop section.
8:58 Speaker 02 I only buy the heavy stuff.
9:00 Matt Kirshen? Yeah. It does sound very much like something that's represented by a glowing image in an advert.
9:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That too, yeah, the glowing aisle. These are the isotopes if you want to totally mimic.
9:12 Speaker 02 I don't think that actually exists yet. That would be fun to just like, for example, water. Water tells us about what kind of water is present. So oxygen in the water shows us, for example, is the water from a small puddle of leftover rain, basically, that evaporated and you only have a little bit of water remaining in a super arid environment, for example, or is it from a river or a big lake that is present all year round in the music.
9:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so this is deep. So what you're saying is, again, I'm only repeating so I make sure I understand. And so, so oxygen, as we know, it has sort of eight protons and eight neutrons in its nucleus. So we think of of happy oxygen as oxygen sixteen, right?
9:59 Speaker 02 That is the one we learn in school, yes.
10:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, the one we learn about in school. And then you can find versions of oxygen that have extra neutrons. One of them is, has eight neutrons and eight electrons and ten neutrons. This would be oxygen eighteen, right? So now, if you make water, because hydrogen doesn't care, it just cares that it's oxygen, right? So hydrogen binds with the oxygen. Some of them will be bound with oxygen eighteen, others with oxygen sixteen. And now the water is just standing there. And you have slow evaporation. So is it correct to think that the lighter water molecule will evaporate preferentially relative to the heavier water molecule?
10:43 Speaker 02 Exactly.
10:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that standing water will ultimately have more oxygen eighteen water molecules than fresh water that just came in? Is that, is that, did I get that right?
10:53 Speaker 02 Exactly. And then if you, for example, drink from that water, and I pull your tooth out and measure it, and I can see on this.
11:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You just do this?
11:03 Speaker 02 I do that all the time.
11:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm not visiting your lab. That's what she's doing.
11:07 Speaker 02 Okay, let's say, let's say one day you might not be here anymore and you get fossilized.
11:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I want to die first and then you can pull my teeth out, okay?
11:14 Speaker 02 And then in four million years I will come and I will find your tooth. And your tooth is so resistant to diogenesis, so to doing processes of fossilization, basically, that your isotopic fingerprint is still present in your tooth. So four million years later, or even twenty million years later, if preservation as well, I can see what kind of water you drank. So did you live in New York and you drank from the Hudson River? Or did you live in the savanna and you have a tiny puddle of just a little bit of standing water full of mosquitoes and bugs?
11:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait a minute, so you had, so you already, you can identify Hudson water? Which isotope is that?
11:55 Speaker 02 Okay.
11:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You don't want to know.
11:56 Speaker 02 Okay. Now we get really deep. So it's, I mean, you can, with isotopes, you can actually see where a product came from in soil and in something. I was, I would not be able to, right now, have ten samples and pick out which one is Hudson River and which one is the East River or anything. But all I'm saying is I can see what kind of water it has. Like if it's evaporative water or if it's in a lush bean landscape, basically, water that is available all over the place, which is, of course, for our human evolution, quite interesting. If those early hominins had a lot of water stress and they had to migrate long distances or they, I don't know, they couldn't find any water and would maybe die of, in a drought.
12:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What I love about this is that you are taking, you're speaking as a chemist, but you're applying your chemistry background to paleontology.
12:46 Speaker 02 I am, I am a geologist, actually. I am a geosciences by training as my undergrad. And then, but then I focused on geochemistry a long time ago, like a long time in my timeframe, not in geologic timeframe.
13:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? She was there when the
13:03 Speaker 02 The last ten years.
13:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In the last ten years. So, so when we hear the paleo diet, which is showing up,
13:11 Speaker 02 Yes.
13:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It rears its head every now and then. And my first thought is, you know, paleo people didn't really live much past thirty. Do I want to eat the way they do? Why is that something we should So tell me, what is the, what is the, I don't want to ask a health food person, I want to ask you.
13:31 Speaker 02 Yes.
13:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What the hell is a paleo diet?
13:33 Speaker 02 And that is a question that we, there is no paleo diet, I think. So if you think about, I just talked about three to four million years time span. And early hominins that evolved, that lived in different areas and different like continents, basically, in younger times, they expanded to Europe and everything. So they had really different resources available and everything. So if somebody talks about the paleo diet, I always think, how paleo do you want to go? Like, how far back do you want to go? Do you want to eat like an Australopithecus, three million years ago, or, I don't know, Neanderthal, which is not that long ago, but lived in a very different, very different environment nevertheless. So for me, it's always really difficult to understand the paleo diet. And
14:18 Speaker 02 if I then read up on it, which of course I should, because I get this question sometimes, then I'm always thinking, another point is you can't get a paleolithic diet. So we modified our food so widely, like plants, but also animals were, were manipulated, basically. If you think about a banana, for example, it used to look very, very different. Now we have those beautiful bananas, but they can't even reproduce. They don't have seeds anymore. And while a meal that for our ancestors was healthy, because they were running around in the savanna, they were hunter and gatherers, they were outside all day long, they didn't necessarily became that old, but they were really healthy. They had a good nutrition.
14:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They were vital.
14:59 Speaker 02 They're vital, exactly. They thrive usually and everything. And then we started this agricultural lifestyle, basically, which was
15:07 Speaker 02 In a way also for us because it was possible to, it made our population explode, basically. Suddenly you had crops, you could maintain food, you could store it often if you're at one place and everything. But of course, then people were also getting more obese, they had cavities, they got sickness by living together in close proximity with animals, for example, and all of this.
15:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We even had to invent a word to describe when everybody gets sick from having, getting a disease from animal. Pandemic.
15:35 Speaker 02 Very clever, yes.
15:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We gotta take a quick break, but when we come back, more of Tina Ludecki.
15:44 Speaker 02 Not bad.
15:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Who's our paleo expert in the house, and we'll see you guys in just a moment.
15:57 Speaker 03 Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival, and I support StarTalk on Patreon, Bringing the Universe Down to Earth. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
16:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back. StarTalk. We're talking about the paleo diet and paleo climate with Tina Ludecki. Did I get that right, Tina?
16:25 Speaker 02 Almost. Ludeck.
16:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Almost. Okay, let's keep working on it. And of course, Matt Kershaw as my co-host. Always good to have you back, Matt.
16:33 Matt Kirshen? Lovely to be here.
16:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're thinking about the paleo, paleo, Tina, what do I call that period of time? Paleo-
16:42 Speaker 02 Paleolithic or neo-gene.
16:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Neo-gene, paleolithic, okay.
16:47 Speaker 02 We have lots of different terms, a lot of different spans.
16:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, all right, I'll go with it. I'll take them all. And so, in there, you're thinking about not only climate, but environment in which our ancestors lived. I'm intrigued because- When people say, "I want to go on a paleo diet," and you're telling us that different places had different diets. So there is no one paleo diet. And so you are figuring this out from your scientific investigations. You told us about the oxygen and isotopes of oxygen.
17:23 Speaker 02 Oxygen and carbon.
17:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Carbon, also, we all know carbon 14, right? That's a famous carbon isotope.
17:30 Speaker 02 So maybe you noticed that so far I only talked about the plant-based diet, right? So with carbon, I can look at what kind of plants were eaten. And nitrogen is actually a great tool to reconstruct the meat-based part of the diet. So was meat consumed by the individualized sample? And we see with each trophic level, basically, the delta 15 N values would increase.
17:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So this would be nitrogen 15, which is the isotope of the happy nitrogen at 14, which is 7 proton, 7 neutrons. Okay, so you look at the ratio of those two, and what does that tell you?
18:05 Speaker 02 Exactly, so this usually tells me trophic level. So was meat consumed or not? And here, it's interesting, so this system is well-established. I mean, there is always loose ends about it, but it's well-established. But it was only possible to measure, actually, on samples that were like up to 150,000 years old, basically. So something under 1,000 was measured, for example. But 150,000 years, and I just said, "I want to look at millions of years." So I was always bothered by the fact that I could reconstruct an ancient, like in really early hominins, I could reconstruct the plant-based diet, but I could not look at the meat part of the diet. And we have stone tools, we have cut marks, which are like 3.5 million years old or something. So cut marks on fossilized bones.
18:49 Speaker 02 So we have indicators that meat consumers started quite early in hominins. But no, it was not possible to actually look into this.
18:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, so you're inferring, correctly, no doubt, that you see bones of animals that have...
19:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Fossilized bones of animals that have markings on them indicating that someone was hacking at them, cutting, perhaps cutting away meat.
19:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
19:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So.
19:14 Matt Kirshen? With some kind of tool.
19:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, with a tool. And why would you do that unless you were going to eat the animal?
19:19 Speaker 02 But that's the question. Who exactly did it? Who, I mean, we don't find an Australopithecus with a stone tool and a cut marked bone in his hand, basically. So we don't have direct evidence who actually did it. So, so I was really frustrated about the fact that, that it was not able, that I was not able to reconstruct the meat part of the diet. And then finally, this year only, actually, basically, I was able to establish a method to measure nitrogen on fossil teeth and with colleagues from the MPIC and especially Jennifer Lick-Ladder. So I was able to.
19:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? MPIC, Max Planck.
19:54 Speaker 02 Max Planck Institute, exactly. And now finally, for the first time ever, we are able to have direct evidence of meat consumption, or we can have it if we measure different hominins, of which hominins started when to include meat in their diet? And what that possibly means, like for the success of our species, for example, or the extinction of other species.
20:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So this would have been the beginning. Once they figured out how to eat meat. Matt, do you think I'm right here? This is, this is, this is the birth of vegetarians because they want to, they don't want to eat the meat.
20:26 Matt Kirshen? Yeah, I mean, I, I, I don't eat meat and I would have been very unspecial in the before carnival time, so it's. What, what would you even talk about? How would you distinguish yourself at a party?
20:35 Speaker 02 You must become vegan then.
20:36 Matt Kirshen? How would you make yourself a nuisance?
20:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, the vegans, where are the vegans? Right. We haven't invented vegans yet.
20:41 Speaker 02 We basically have if you take away breast milk. So of course, early hominins were also not yet eating or drinking milk in, when, once they were older. So after weaning, after taking away the breast milk, they would also be vegan. You would basically have a diet like a typical happy boy.
21:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, so what you're saying is some paleo diets from in your range of food consumption that you found would be classified as vegan.
21:09 Speaker 02 Uh huh, correct.
21:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, so, so this idea that paleo diet is just meat and no potatoes, uh, that's just a misnomer.
21:17 Speaker 02 Yes, in a way, yes, yeah, you don't, there is, our stomachs and our guts, for example, are not adapted to just eat meat. We can't have a diet like a lion has nowadays. We just can't. So we are omnivores, we have to eat plant parts. And as we know, as Matt just said, he is vegetarian, and I used to be vegetarian for 10 years, and I'm fine.
21:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How do you know you're fine?
21:41 Speaker 02 I feel quite good, actually. I feel okay. I didn't die.
21:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You could be completely different now, had you not, you don't know, you are just you in any moment.
21:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now, actually, Matt's collected questions for us from our fanbase, so this is sort of a hybrid cosmic queries, but we still have so much more we want to learn from you directly. But Matt, why don't we throw in a question?
22:07 Matt Kirshen? Yeah, so I've got a bunch of questions from Patreon.
22:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good.
22:10 Matt Kirshen? Uh, first of all, Josh V. asks, "What kind of evidence is considered when determining what an ancient tribe of people regularly consumed? Are there remains of food from tens of thousands of years ago?"
22:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Interesting, yeah, can food get fossilized the way other things can? Like, can you see, can you see a whole table setting fossilized in place?
22:30 Speaker 02 First of all, I have to say, I really like the word "regularly" in there. Oh, I hate it, I like it, I'm not sure, but if I think about my, like, if my study to look at stable isotopes, I have one point in time from one individual, but it's actually really interesting to see what a whole tribe would eat and what it would regularly eat. So the actual study of food material, as you said, it's super difficult because most of the food decayed, we know that. But however, if you have burned a meal, so by accidental cooking accident in your little cave or something, then material like seeds and pollen and grains can preserve over a super long time scales, basically indefinitely, if you have the right environment for them.
23:12 Speaker 02 And these plant remains, you can actually see, for example, if a crop was wild or cultivated already, by the structure they have. That, for example, dated like the earliest domestication of rice to like eleven and a half thousand years ago in China, for example. But of course, that is still not the long time scale we look at, because you have to find those ashes, basically, with the food in it. But then there are lots of different fun things, for example, coprolites are really interesting.
23:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What is that?
23:42 Speaker 02 Coprolites.
23:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What is that?
23:44 Speaker 02 Fossilized feces.
23:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, okay, keep the other name for it, fine.
23:49 Speaker 02 Coprolite sounds much nicer.
23:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sorry I asked.
23:52 Speaker 02 So you have fossilized feces.
23:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
23:54 Speaker 02 And you do have wonderfully preserved coprolites, where you can, of course, do different chemical or other analyzers within to see what the animal ate, digested, and then left behind, basically.
24:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I think there's a good scene in the original Jurassic Park film, where one of the scientists was an expert in studying the feces. And so the animal keeps moving and it's still kind of steaming, right? And then it reach in and we're all just kind of looking at that, like, ooh. But it was, I'd forgotten that, yeah, I mean.
24:29 Speaker 02 It doesn't stink anymore forty-two million years later, that's a good part.
24:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don't, I don't believe you. Depends on.
24:35 Speaker 02 But then, we also have, of course, if you, like, think about human, like, the oldest food, and then you have, for example, the oldest bread is like fourteen thousand four hundred years old in Jordan. So that is even older than the first, the start of agriculture, so you made it with, by cereals. And one of the oldest thing I can think about right now is wine. So in Georgia, wine was produced eight thousand years ago.
25:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just outside of Atlanta, I think, in Georgia, that's where they did that, right?
25:05 Speaker 02 Okay. The other one.
25:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The other, oh, oh.
25:09 Speaker 02 I'm European.
25:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is America.
25:12 Matt Kirshen? I heard, uh, five thousand eight hundred and one B.C. was a particularly good vintage.
25:18 Speaker 02 Really sunny, really nice, but it's quite expensive, yeah.
25:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so this, so you have a lot of access points into what we did.
25:29 Speaker 02 Into, for me, which is the really young past, basically. Again, if I think about million of years ago, it's, it becomes, I mean, calculates, as I said, or you can have the, um, dental calculus, which can have like pollen or like even DNA structures of whatever you ate. Um, but of course, something like the, the wine or the bread or some super old cheese from Egypt, for example, that is of course something what I consider just yesterday, from yesterday, basically.
25:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, and in another, you know, hundred thousand years or so, your descendants will look at the, uh, North America and what was once the United States, and they'll find perfectly intact Twinkies.
26:11 Speaker 02 Twinkies and burgers. Don't like burgers also stay like McDonald's burger like forever?
26:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So.
26:20 Matt Kirshen? I believe so.
26:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so whether it can be preserved is a whole other thing, because that changes whether it was preserved is another sort of effort.
26:28 Speaker 02 Yes.
26:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To, to make that happen. Matt, give me another question.
26:31 Matt Kirshen? This, uh, comes from Leslie Goodwill, but actually from Leslie's daughter Trinity, who asks, "How does the change in diet, uh, parentheses, cooked food, impact upon human development?
26:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ooh.
26:44 Matt Kirshen? Can this be applied to other animals? Thank you."
26:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Tina, that question reminds me that today, among the many sort of paths of diets that people take, one of them is the raw food diet.
26:55 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
26:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, and so I never really understood that, because I think the food tastes better if you cook it.
27:01 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
27:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But, uh, this, I think this is a brilliant question from Trinity, I guess, ask that?
27:06 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:07 Matt Kirshen? Yes.
27:07 Speaker 02 I agree, it's very interesting. So if you cook food, you, you break up, for example, the starches in, in potatoes or something into easily, like, available, energy-rich sugars. So they are, you still have the same stuff in your potato, but it's easily accessible for your body and you can actually use it. And um so when cooked, you have a higher energy output of the same the same food product, basically. So if you think about early hominins, which are like they have this brains that grew over time and they developed, um they have lots of um babies and fetuses and everything. So
27:47 Speaker 02 you would think about you have um access to food that has higher energy, basically. So you spend much less time of actually eating, collecting. I mean, you spend time on preparing food and pounding and cutting and cooking, of course, but you would then have more of it. So you have more time for social behavior, for grooming. Um I just think about I I was with um with primatologists in Mozambique in the Gorgong National Park and they they look they they um study baboons and they took me a day on a field trip, basically. And I was giving a a chart with the checklist and you would see what an animal and baboon does all day long. And I had this checklist and it ate and ate and ate. It just sits there
28:31 Speaker 02 and eats. It has not that much time for anything else. So for us, we then had we had lots of energy to actually um change our morphology, basically, to grow bigger brains, to have more kids. Yeah.
28:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did I hear Tina correctly, Matt? Didn't she just say that had the baboon been given higher energy food, it would have time to like build spaceships and and you know
28:52 Matt Kirshen? Yeah.
28:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? construct and create a whole civilization? I think that's what she just said, right?
28:56 Matt Kirshen? I think so. And that also worries me because uh I'm still in lockdown and I'm just eating and eating and eating. So I'm pretty worried about being overtaken by the baboon.
29:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's right. So so Tina, what you're saying is what percentage of your life do you spend tracking down food to eat? Then that's all you do for your survival. There's no free time. There's no leisure time. There's no you can't think up algebra. You know, there's no there's no luxury.
29:22 Speaker 02 You can't learn stuff like that.
29:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That doesn't contribute to your own survival.
29:26 Speaker 02 And of course, and the own survival is of course also given by having kids. And we still benefit from this cooking of meat. If you think about, we only breastfeed for a year on average or something like this. And humans, modern humans can have kids easily a year and a half apart. So my sister, my older sister is only one and a half years older than I am. And that is quite okay and normal. If you look at chimps, they're usually five years apart. But we have the advantage, we cook our food, we can mush it. We have all this energy in it. And then you would, you are able to feed your kid much earlier food, like mashed up potatoes and carrots and not just give it a potato or a carrot in the hand and let it munch on it.
30:10 Speaker 02 So this actually helped our species to evolve and to be successful as well.
30:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I, I think what you're really saying is it helped our species to get fat much earlier.
30:21 Speaker 02 That as well, that as well.
30:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As well. We're gonna take another quick break. When we come back, more of this installment of Startalk, the Paleo Diet, when we return.
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31:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back, Startalk. We're talking about Paleolithic peoples and what they ate and how that mattered in their lives. And then how did it help the birth of civilization? I want to go get back to Trinity's question about eating raw versus cooked foods. I think I read a book or knew of a book that said that cooking food meant you didn't have to chew your meat as long.
31:39 Speaker 02 That is also very true. You break the proteins in the meat are getting broken up already during cooking. So you get more out of your steak if you don't eat it raw, but if you eat it, well done.
31:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you break the proteins, does that change their nutritional value to you?
31:55 Speaker 02 It just, I think it just makes it easier accessible for your body. So you can use more of the energy.
32:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can use more of the energy and you get the energy in your body faster.
32:05 Speaker 02 Mm hmm.
32:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that you can spend less time chewing and more time inventing calculus.
32:09 Speaker 02 For example.
32:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? For, okay.
32:11 Matt Kirshen? That also does cover Cody Klobowski's question to an extent, which is what changed did the addition of cooked meat? Making the diets of early hominids. So specifically the meat.
32:22 Speaker 02 The meat, yeah. Yes, there we go. So I, but so I think meat, as I said earlier, I tried to really pinpoint down which taxer would eat meat and when they would start and what effect this has on evolution, basically. Right now, we think about two and a half million years ago, that's um, without the ability of controlled fire, meat was already part of the, of the diet. But then roughly 1.9 million years ago, a dramatic change began to occur in early hominid bodies. So they grew larger, the brains increased a lot in size and complexity. And they had adaptation for long distance running. And a long time it was thought that just because they had more access to meat, they had the, the resources, basically, the energy to do all this.
33:08 Speaker 02 But new studies suggest actually that they had control of fire during that time. So they were able to cook this meat. So it doesn't mean they wouldn't eat more meat, but it also means they would cook the meat and get more out of it, basically.
33:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So here's an interesting thought, I think. Alright, so, right, you can't cook meat until you harness fire. So who had the idea? When they see a burning bush and say, let me put my meat in that and then eat it. That, this is, this is a brave person.
33:38 Speaker 02 But I think, I would think it would happen more like you have a wildfire and a day later you go back through it and you find a burned bobbit, a burned antelope or something. And then you would be like, huh, that smells tasty. That's what I could imagine. That's not my expertise.
33:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's sure. That's gotta be how it happened because otherwise you can't get close enough to the fire to think that anything good is gonna happen by you interacting with it. But you're right, I'm hungry and there's a thing and the antelope is there and I'm hungry and it's like yum yum. Let's do this again. Very cool. Matt, give me another question.
34:15 Matt Kirshen? All right, and this one, I'm guessing is a parent who's trying to get kids to eat because it's from Abinav. Abinav Abraham, and the question is, hey Neil and Tina, is there any evidence of condiments being used by our early ancestors? Can't imagine the fuss created by the young ones to eat raw veggies and meat.
34:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow, I love that.
34:36 Matt Kirshen? That's definitely a parent.
34:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What's the invention of sauce and ketchup? Yeah, give it to me. What do you have?
34:43 Matt Kirshen? Salt, pepper, what happened?
34:44 Speaker 02 As far as I know, condiments are not really known in our early ancestors. I can't imagine that happened like anytime super early. One early condiment I can think of is garam. So it's produced by crushing the innards of fish and then you ferment them with salt and that enhances your flavor. Like you have glutamic acid basically and it enhances the flavor of your given food. And that was already used by like the Romans, but I think only the elites. So if you're super rich, you could afford this and you would pepper food with it.
35:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so Romans are like yesterday on your time scale.
35:21 Speaker 02 Exactly.
35:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's easy to extrapolate backwards and say, no, nobody had ketchup or anything like that.
35:26 Speaker 02 I don't, I can't imagine, but then again, there might be just the evidence might be not there. It doesn't mean it's not present. I just, we just haven't found it. So as I say, the farther you go back in time, so much difficult it will be to find like this one mustard seed that's older than 3,000 years or something.
35:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, it could, it might have just started out where they just put different, you know. Foods have different flavors and then you realize if you use one to help change the flavor of another one, that can makes a whole new kind of dish. It could just be, uh, the food ended up touching itself on the plate. Hey, that's better together rather than, yeah, yeah, cuz you know, kids hate that.
36:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
36:06 Matt Kirshen? Would, would, would salt be, would you be able to detect any salt in someone's diet? Would there be more sodium or chlorine in their bones or would, cuz we naturally have salt in us anyway, right?
36:16 Speaker 02 We would, yes. We have quite a lot of salt. Um, and of course, we know salt has been used like for fermentation and for, um.
36:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Preservation.
36:24 Speaker 02 Preservation, there's the word, thank you.
36:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mm hmm.
36:26 Speaker 02 Um, I wouldn't know if you would find it in your, in your bones, basically. And as I said, bones are difficult because they're so porous, so they change during the time of fossilization. So it's always difficult to find anything like this out of, out of really old fossils, basically.
36:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so what about vitamins? Obviously, vitamins are a modern understanding of the needs in our foods. But paleo people obviously knew nothing of vitamins. Yet, so back to the previous question, if we know certain vitamins come to us from vegetables and little children hate vegetables, no reason why those children would love it and ours hate it. I'm guessing they hated vegetables too, but they needed it for their own health. But do you have any insights into the role of vitamins back then?
37:12 Speaker 02 Hmm, I'm not sure about this. So I, I think, so I picture the kids of early hominins like chimps or something today. Or as you said, they want the tasty fruit that has lots of sugar and not the boring plant with the vitamins or something. But I think what we lost over time a little bit is like the, sometimes you have a craving and then you really want, I don't know, a red pepper or something like this. So I think your body instantly often feels what it's lacking. And so you have it in the, in the wild too with animals of, of, yeah, some, some birds, somebody eating salt or something because they really need it. So I think this natural instinct might have been more present in, um, in early hominins. And then possibly they would not hate it that much.
37:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's a YouTube video of goats, mountain goats ascending the side of a dam because the minerals in the rocks are high in salt. And they, and this ascending, and it's really, really steep. And they go up there and they're licking it. It was like, dude, just go to the local store. You know, I'm glad we have civilization.
38:17 Speaker 02 Yes.
38:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We'd be some dead humans attempting, attempting that.
38:21 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
38:23 Matt Kirshen? But it's about the challenge. It's about the, the joy of getting up there.
38:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, that's what they're telling each other. That's what you're, you're sure about that, man.
38:29 Speaker 02 Come on, Tim, let's go up there and lick some salt.
38:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Matt, give me another one.
38:35 Matt Kirshen? Okay, so this one comes from Dave Armstrong and says, "Let's say we have a close shave on changing our planet and we actually live through it." It's a relatively pessimistic view, but plausible. "What diet changes should we be making to prepare for climate change, including agricultural processes and systems? What diets sustained our ancestors through tough times? And what could we do to systemize their fats for possible climate shift?"
39:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow. Yeah, so Tina, you could be the number one source of insight that we can get when our world becomes so bad that either the animals go away or the crops go away. And you'll say, well, back, you know, Lucy, the Australopithecus, she did this. So why don't we do that?
39:18 Speaker 02 Well, but she didn't make it, so let's do it different than Lucy.
39:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
39:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, I really like this question. It's a tough one, but it's, it's cool. It's interesting because people usually think that we are such a successful species, so nothing can really happen to us. But if you think about it, Lucy and her whole taxa and her species and all of our other ancestors sooner or later went extinct. They did not make it. So it's interesting if we think about the current climate change and what that brings with us. It's much faster than what usually happened in the paleo record. So it will happen, it already starts to happen, super quick for different reasons, of course, mostly from absence of use. And it will be soon, it might be hotter on our planet than it has ever been during early hominid times, basically. So it will be new challenges.
40:09 Speaker 02 But so far, I think what brought us through it is flexibility.
40:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I only just figured out what you meant when you said Lucy, the Australopithecus, didn't make it. What you meant was that that entire... Committed line didn't make it.
40:23 Speaker 02 Yeah.
40:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because if they did, they'd still be, we'd have Australopithecus living next door.
40:27 Speaker 02 Exactly, yeah.
40:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If they, if they made it. So whatever it was they were doing with their environment, they went extinct.
40:32 Speaker 02 Yes, and they just adapted in a different way. And one of the most keys of success for our species is thought to be the high flexibility. So we were able to survive ice ages, for example, and cold climate and warm climate and wet and dry climates and everything. Because also due to our big brains, we were able to adapt to different environmental pressures, basically. And I think we take this now to a totally different level. So if you think about adaptation, or if I think about adaptation, I think about a different size of a jaw and longer legs or something like this. But if you think about it today, we build greenhouses. We ship water, like we transfer water from A to B to water some, some crops.
41:16 Speaker 02 We, I don't know, even shoot particles in the sky to, to introduce rain, for example, and stuff like this. So we alter our environment.
41:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To fit us.
41:26 Speaker 02 To fit us, basically. But that, of course, will only go to one extent. At some point, I think it will all be too bad.
41:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is it true that you find humans in more diverse, other than some small bacteria perhaps, uh, you find humans in more diverse environments than any other animal?
41:44 Speaker 02 Yes, I think so. I, I think so. I mean, we have, we, we, and we are all like, we all look quite still alike, right? We, we should all be adapted to one ecosystem, but we make clothes. Um, and we, we eat different diets, possibly if we live in different, um, regions to, like, for example, to get more vitamin D if there's no sun around and stuff like this. So we inhabit every corner of this earth, basically, and no other species really is able to do that.
42:12 Matt Kirshen? Well, this also dovetails quite neatly into the final question, which is from Agastya Suresh, says, "I've seen Homo sapiens referred to as the "child of the Ice Age." If we were shaped in that extreme climate, what kind of evolutionary adaptations could we expect in the future, given extreme climate change?
42:29 Speaker 02 So, actually, thinking about the Ice Age, the climate is not even that extreme. So what happens during a cold phase there is so much water gets bound on the northern hemisphere, basically, you have that kilometer-thick ice stacks, and it binds so much water that, yes, it is colder, but it's also very dry. So you don't have this horrible icy rain that I would hate so much, that you, even with the modern clothing, you can't really shelter from. So you have dry, cold environments.
43:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, and you're telling me that the famous joke about, "Yeah, I visited hell, it was hot, but it was a dry heat." So now you're telling me, "The Ice Age, it was cold, but it was a dry cold."
43:13 Speaker 02 Which is much better. Did you ever wait for the bus or something for 10 minutes standing there?
43:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, okay, okay.
43:20 Matt Kirshen? That's true. I've definitely been warmer coming off a ski slope and just sitting in the sun, having a beer than I have back in England in the sleet and rain.
43:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so when our ancient, so when cavemen was waiting for a bus, they would have preferred dry.
43:35 Speaker 02 They would have, yeah.
43:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what you're saying, okay.
43:37 Speaker 02 And what's really interesting there during that time, you have actually a similar in Europe. You had mammoths, you had woolly rhinos, and lions and hyenas. So you have a different fauna than you would have in Africa, in the savannas. So people actually, early humans migrating, found a setting they could actually work with and slowly adapt to, basically.
44:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so you're talking about adaptation because we're smart and we can figure out how to shape an environment. You're not talking about an evolutionarily adaptive aspect of us, correct?
44:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I mean, you know, we can adapt because we can put on a coat.
44:15 Speaker 02 Yes.
44:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But if, I think part of that question might have been, is there something in our evolutionary future? I think what would have to happen is, the climate change would kill half the population, and whoever survives, their bodies are just fine with it, right? I mean, that's how evolution works.
44:33 Speaker 02 But over millions of years. So I think what we are facing right now would be really, is really quick, basically. And I think there, the expansion of our brain and our intelligence is what hopefully will save us from this. So I, of course, the humans are also morphology still evolving. We do change. Our gut system changed to different, yeah, this lactose intolerance, for example, is a super new trait, basically. And so we do evolve, we do change. And I don't think that if the climate gets hotter by two degrees Celsius very quick, that suddenly we will all adapt to that in a way of having sales, we can, I don't know, evaporate our sweat better or something.
45:16 Speaker 02 I don't really see that happen in the timeframes we are looking at.
45:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mm-hmm. Except if we have control over the genome, then we play god, right? And, and we make whatever change we want.
45:28 Speaker 02 Yes. Oh, that's gonna be thought on.
45:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's, you know, I want six fingers so I can play the piano with, you know, play more keys on the piano.
45:38 Matt Kirshen? More complex chords.
45:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, exactly, exactly. See, that, that's in the possibility. We'll have to bring you back and comment on that when that happens.
45:45 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, yeah.
45:46 Matt Kirshen? Yeah, can you extract nitrogen isotopes from pianos?
45:50 Speaker 02 If they eat meat.
45:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's right, the carnivorous piano. The famous carnivorous piano way back from the year 2050. Anyway, Tina, we have to call it quits there, but Tina Ludeke, I think, that's a little better than I began. Great to have you on. This is a path of expertise. Like, who even thought that we have experts running around who think about this sort of thing? And it's great to have you and get a little slice of what your world is. And, and so Matt, always good to have you, man.
46:25 Matt Kirshen? Oh, it's lovely to be here. Thanks for having me.
46:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, and it's science.
46:31 Matt Kirshen? Probably science, probably.
46:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Probably.
46:33 Matt Kirshen? Probably science. That's the podcast.
46:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Probably science podcast. And I was delighted to have been a guest on your show.
46:39 Matt Kirshen? It was a treat.
46:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And invite me again, we'll do it again.
46:42 Matt Kirshen? Oh, that's fantastic. I love that.
46:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, excellent. So we got to call it quits there. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And always I bid you to keep looking up.
Previous Cosmic Queries – Medieval Science and History Next Gambits and Game Theory Page updated September 28, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
