The 'Real' Paleo Diet According To Ancient Skeleton Revealed

Looking at the bones of an ancient skeleton in Washington state reveals an interesting twist to the original "paleo" diet, according to abcnews.

The main object of examination has been the strange Kennewick skeleton after it was discovered near the city in 1996. It is 9,000 years old, and looks different compared to the ethnicity of other native people, says Henry Schwarcz, a geochemist and professor emeritus at the School of Geography and Earth Sciences at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.

Schwarcz probed the diets of ancient people by looking into isotopes in bones, and revealed that he was amazed after looking at the collagen in the bones of Kennewick man in order to identify his paleodiet.

"This guy was apparently living on a diet almost exclusively of marine foods; foods that come from the ocean," Schwarcz said.

The results were surprising as the man was discovered 350 miles inland along the Columbia River near plains full of terrestrial wildlife. He was most probably surviving on salmon swimming upstream, but was not likely to be hunting in the fields.

"He was choosing not to eat that wildlife," Schwarcz said, according to perthnews.

The geochemist explained that the Kennewick man may have "had a prejudice against eating footed creatures. That's not really something that we [see.]," he said. It is not clear why that man did not eat the footed creatures of the wild at that time.

The Kennewick skeleton's owner probably lived about 10,000 to 2.5 million years before agriculture became the main occupation of the residents.

Ken Sayers, an anthropologist at Georgia State Uity in Atlanta and one of the lead authors of the recent Quarterly Review of Biology of how ancient people ate, said that there is no evidence to prove that humans at the time lived on any specialised kinds of diets.

"Whatever angle you chose to look at the diets of our early ancestors, it's hard to pinpoint any one particular feeding strategy," Sayers said.