Linguistics Evolution and Geographic Isolation

This post is brought to you by the letter “L” for linguistics. I have come to think about his because of my reading about linguistics. In linguistics it is thought that humanity’s languages all stemmed from a single language called Proto-Indo-European, and then as the tribes broke up and migrated to other regions cutting themselves off geographically and culturally from their original tribe, culture, and language their language eventually evolved into the language families that we see today like the romance, slavic, germanic, etc; and then those individual language families evolved into the individual languages that we see today.

The key point here is isolation brings about a different evolutionary path, albeit, in this case,  a linguistic one.

Dietary Evolution and Geographic Isolation

As early homosapiens separated from their tribes and developed unique cultural and linguistic traits they also traveled to areas where the climates and therefore food sources were different, and as thousands of years passed I believe that our bodies developed a physiology more tuned to processing the foods that were apart of  the normal diet for that region, and potentially lost the genes that allowed efficient and/or health processing of other foods which were not staples of their current dietary intake.

People who lived in inland areas where they are used to drinking cows milk and eating wheat products will have the genes to efficiently make use of eating those products.  People who lived by the sea would develop genes to more efficiently eat seafood, sea weed and other sea products while potentially losing the genes for wheat and milk. You can come up with many situational examples like this from region to region as to what is common and what is not.

Genetics and Dietary Requirements

With all of this being said what I am really going to postulate here is that I bet that if we trace where our geographical genetic lineage is based we can have a better idea as to what foods we will most likely be able to take advantage of.  Genetic testing can help us to eat better and be healthier by knowing what foods we may be tuned to take advantage of.

Another Option

Perhaps an easier solution would be to come up with some baseline nutritional food source that has all of the USRD recommendations and then take blood test, urine and fecal tests, etc to find out how we process nutrients and how much our body’s we really need in a day. By knowing how much is removed from the body and so on we can see how much we, individually, really need each day.

We can also do similar tests for specific products like wheat, dairy, etc and see how we respond and process them to determine if our body will process it efficiently and safely.