Ott 1
Charlie Ott 47943458
ANTH2302 Spring 2020
The Paleo Diet: Bananas and Wine
The Paleo Diet is a diet based upon the eating habits of our ancestors who were hunter-
gatherers. People who follow this diet in modern times are attempting to eat only what their
evolutionary ancestors had access to. This included only what nature created for them to eat.
Many people around the world follow this diet, but they don’t follow this strict diet regimen out
of necessity. People follow this diet to get in touch with evolutionary ancestors. According to
Adrienne Rose Johnson, a doctoral candidate from Stanford University, “An estimated three
million Americans currently follow some version of the Paleo diet, and Paleo books are among
the best-selling titles within an already blockbuster genre” (Johnson, 2015, “The Paleo Diet and
the American Weight Loss Utopia 1975–2014”, Utopian Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, pg. 101). The
Paleo Diet is typically viewed as a weight-loss tactic, but it is important to understand that the
Paleo Diet was the way of life for our ancestors before us. By following this diet, we get a better
glimpse of what life was thousands of years before we were born. As agriculture increased and
humans began to domesticate more plants, our ancestors began to eat more than what was
provided by the Paleo Diet. Many people argue that the human body is not evolved enough yet to
handle the modern diets’ humans eat. Throughout this essay, I will be analyzing the origin and
evolution of bananas, which are accepted under the Paleo diet, and wine, which is not accepted.
For a while, it was very unclear on where bananas were first domesticated and adopted
for humans, but as our ability to gain information from microscopic evidence has grown, we
have been able to narrow down where bananas were first domesticated. Bananas were first
domesticated in Papua New Guinea by the people who lived in the Kuk Swamp (Hunt, 2018,
“Peeling Back the History of the Banana”, SAPIENS. This occurred around 7000 years ago.
Before domestication, they existed in the wild under the species name Musa acuminata. This
domestication by humans has slowly evolved the banana into something completely different
from the original wild species to the cultivar it is today. These changes include the loss of seeds
and the ability to create new plants without the use of fertilizer. This evolution from the original
wild species is a culmination of the hybridization of the plant which is the crossing of different
species. The main evidence used to pin the first domestication of bananas is the existence of
phytoliths which are small silica particles that exist in plants and last for millions of years.
Archeologists have used phytoliths in the last century to help gain knowledge of plant
domestication and more importantly where they were domesticated. Phytoliths are left behind
after plant domestication, and this is how archeologists determined that bananas were first
domesticated in the Kuk Swamp of Papua New Guinea.
