Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live by Marlene Zuk

(Norton, $28)

Extreme nostalgia is much in vogue, said Robert Herritt in TheDailyBeast.com. For a certain health-conscious segment of the population, it’s become a bedrock faith that we’d all be healthier and happier if we only ate, exercised, and behaved more like our pre–Bronze Age ancestors. While there’s an attractive elegance to this view, “it is also the kind of back-of-the-napkin evolutionary theorizing that begs to be cut down by a thoughtful specialist.” Enter Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist who “brings the right mixture of expertise and humor

to the task.”

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Zuk “pokes gentle and delightful fun” at the excesses of “paleo” ideology, said Cordelia Fine in The Wall Street Journal. Some adherents, she points out, would have the rest of us eschew every post-caveman innovation from cereal to eyeglasses. And many presume that our big-game-hunting forebears of 10,000 to 60,000 years ago achieved perfect adaptation to their environment. But Zuk reminds us that evolution has never been that simple. Human beings have changed physically since the Pleistocene era, evolving a greater diversity of eye colors, for instance, as well as the ability to digest lactose. What’s more, there was no single paleo lifestyle: Humans, then and now, maintained extremely varied customs. Some, scientists recently discovered, even cooked and ate grains, violating one of the basic prohibitions of today’s paleofantasists.

And still the allure of the caveman persists, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Zuk “hits the nail pretty solidly on the head” in explaining why. “We have,” she writes, “a regrettable tendency to see what we want to see and rationalize what we already want to do.” If we’re caught having an affair, we say it’s because we were never meant to be monogamous. If we want to avoid buying a new pair of running shoes, we say that Homo sapiens evolved to run barefoot. In reality, we don’t live in the same world as cavemen, and we don’t even have their bodies. “It turns out, we’re stuck being us.”