4 HOW OUR ANCESTORS LIVED

3 HOW OUR ANCESTORS LIVED

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FOOD MEMORIES THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, OUR ANCESTORS lived very differently from us. But the way they lived has shaped how we behave today. When you're frightened of monsters in the night, that's a memory from your ancestors. Similarly, when you get up in the morning, eat breakfast and play with friends, you often follow habits that were formed by our Stone Age ancestors on the savannahs of Africa. For example, have you ever wondered why people want to eat things that are bad for their health, such as too much ice cream and chocolate cake? Why does all the bad stuff taste so good? The answer is that our bodies think we're still living in the Stone Age, and back then it made perfect sense to binge on sweet and

fatty food. Our ancestors didn't have supermarkets and fridges. When they were hungry, they walked through the woods and along rivers looking for something to eat. And they never came across an ice-cream tree or a fizzy-drink river! The only sweet food available then was ripe fruit or honey. When they found sweet fruit, the smart thing to do was to eat as much of it as possible, as fast as possible. Suppose a group of Stone Age gatherers went looking for food and came across a fig tree full of sweet ripe figs. Some gatherers ate only a few figs and then said, 'That's enough for us. We're watching our figures'. The other gatherers couldn't say anything because their mouths were so full of figs. They ate and ate and ate until they almost burst. The next day, everybody came back to the tree, but there were no figs left because a group of baboons had found the tree and eaten them all. The people who'd eaten lots of

figs were still feeling a little full, but those who'd eaten just a few were now very hungry. Archaeologists have found many statues from those times, and a lot of them are of full-figured women. The archaeologists named one particularly beautiful statue the Venus of Willendorf. (This wasn't her real name, of course. We don't know what people called her 30,000 years ago.) In Venus's day, body fat was a sign of health and success. Most people in the Stone Age didn't look like Venus, just as most people today don't look like the models in adverts. But everybody knew they should eat as many sweet things as possible. It was good for you! A Stone Age parent might have scolded their child, saying, 'Stop munching those floppy lettuce leaves right now and come eat your sweets!' We've inherited this tendency to eat sweet things from our Stone Age ancestors. In the DNA instruction book inside our bodies, it says in big bold letters, 'If you find something sweet, eat as much as possible as quickly as you can!' Many things have changed since the days of the Venus of Willendorf. Most people these days don't have to walk across the savannah for hours looking for something to eat. Instead, when we're hungry, we take ten steps to the kitchen, open the fridge, and look inside. But when we see a chocolate cake in there, we still react in the same way Stone Age gatherers reacted to a fig tree. Our body reads its instruction book and starts shouting, 'Hey, we found something sweet! Wonderful! Let's gobble up all of it immediately! Hurry! If we wait, the baboons next door will eat it all first!' The instruction book is outdated, but our bodies don't know that we now live in villages and cities rather than on the savannah. Our bodies don't know that there are such things as fridges and chocolate cake. Our bodies don't know that there are no baboons next door. So we eat the whole chocolate cake and the next day, we go to the supermarket and buy another cake. And when we open the fridge door, our body just can't believe its luck and starts shouting again, 'Unbelievable! Something sweet! Eat it all up!' No matter how many times we open the fridge and find a chocolate cake