Marlene Zuk – author of Paleofantasy, professor of ecology

Unless you’ve been living in a cave (best….pun….ever), you are probably well aware of the new fad diet, the paleo diet. The quick and dirty of the diet is you can eat anything that was available to our cave dwelling ancestors. So chow down on all of the fish, meat, fungi and earthworms you want, but you better stay away from anything that came after man found a hoe. The thought process is, given that evolution is an extremely slow process, our modern day bodies just aren’t meant to consume any food that is a result of agriculture or processing. It’s a comforting and nostalgic thought…. with one little problem – it’s total crap. Evolution isn’t all that slow. For example, the ability to digest milk is a recent evolutionary accomplishment – not a science experiment gone wrong. Plus, most of the caveman diet consisted of anything they could find. So unless you’re eating bugs, grass, berries and the very occasional wooly mammoth, you’re not really doing it right at all!

But food isn’t the only thing we think was better off way back when, what about sex? As I so candidly ask in this episode, what about the fact that we now force ourselves into monogamous relationships when really, evolutionarily speaking, we are meant to go spread our seed? I mean, after all we are just primates that managed to climb out of the trees. Not so fast says Professor Zuk. Learn about our historical sex lives, appetite, and more in this week’s episode.

Dr. Marlene Zuk is an author, as well as a professor of ecology, evolution and behavior at the University of Minnesota. Her most recent book is titled Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live.

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