Anthropology chair and Weinberg prof. William Leonard was featured on a Discovery Channel show considering whether modern-day humans could adapt to a Paleolithic diet and lifestyle. “I, Caveman,” which aired Oct. 2, followed 10 people for 10 days as they lived as cavemen and cavewomen in high-altitude Colorado.
“They wanted to ask the question of how well or how poorly modern humans can make it as Paleolithic hunter-gatherers,” Leonard said.
He said he expected the participants to have difficulty without the proper skills needed to handle the scarcity of food and heavier daily workload.
The six men and four women were trained on the basics of survival for a couple of days prior to the show. They learned tips on building fires and identifying safe foods to eat. Once on the show, they were given cloth and fur garments to wear and use when building their sleeping quarters. The participants acquired their own food following a Paleolithic diet of vegetables, roots, nuts, fruits, meats and fish. For the first few days of the show, the participants found minimal natural food resources to eat and were unsuccessful in hunting game to cook.
Leonard and other experts involved in the show served as commentators observing the participants’ interactions.
“One of the things I thought was going to be an issue, and proved to be the case, was the social part of it,” Leonard said.
He said the group was not able to fully recreate the cohesion necessary to form a successful caveman society. Often times, members of the group would get frustrated with the lack of food but would refuse to help find more resources.
Only eight of the 10 participants stayed the full 10 days, Leonard said.
“When you look at traditional forging societies, what is true is obviously they have a lot more knowledge of their environment,” he said. “But they also work together on their environment as a group, hunting and gathering to bring back resources to be shared.”
Todd Surovell, professor of archaeology at the University of Wyoming, also served as an expert on the show. He agreed the group suffered from a lack of background knowledge about natural resources.
“They would walk past food that was edible all the time,” he said. “And even when they went foraging, they didn’t put enough effort into it. Then, as they would lose weight, they would lose the ability to forage even more. It was a downward spiral.”
Aaron Miller, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Northwestern, helped collect baseline data and track biological changes and health factors to evaluate the participants’ level of survival.
“We were really interested in the health effects it would create,” Miller said. “We wanted to know how much weight they would lose, those type of things.”
On average, female participants lost 10.3 pounds, while male participants lost 15.8 pounds over 10 days, according to a report released by the experts.
“We expected a lot of weight loss,” Miller said. “Especially at the beginning when they had trouble finding things to eat.”
The participants all experienced an improvement in blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose, and hemoglobin, which increased due to the high altitude.
The experts were also surprised to see participants’ grip strength remained unchanged despite their extensive weight loss.
The show, Leonard said, highlighted many of the health problems that are a result of big issues in modern lifestyle, including the imbalance of diet and daily activity.
“This underscored just how different life was then, compared to how we live today, ” he said.
Surovell said it is important to realize everyone has ancestors who lived this way only 12,000 years ago.
“We tend to think about prehistoric people as simpletons and as lesser than we are now,” he said. “But they were people just like us living in a different context.”
