Week 3: Paleofantasy

Paleofantasy has shown many connections to our course material. They especially do a good job of incorporating and suggesting other evolutionary concepts other than natural selection which is a major theme of our course. Another big connection between the book and our course material was its talk about agricultural societies and how they differed from the hunters and gatherers. In an agriculture society there were larger groups of people around meaning more and new diseases. The hunters and gatherers were not infected by the diseases since they never stayed in one place but with the dense groups of agriculture populations, it allowed the disease to stick around longer. In class, we discussed how populations adapt and this is one example of that. We also talked about how the evolutionary biology of diseases (like HIV) can tell us more about a disease which relates to how societies were able to adapt to them. This book has done a good job of explaining and giving examples of how we have adapted and changed so much over time from our ancestors which is relatable to our coursework as well. After reading more of this book, it brought up an interesting question which was “why do we have a paleofantasy about the ancestral hunter-gatherer, when our even earlier relations, the apes, spend even less time foraging?” (Paleofantasy, 51). How did we decide which ancestors we should be following? Why did the hunter-gatherers become the ones to follow?