BACKGROUND Paleolithic nutrition, which has attracted substantial public attention lately because of its putative health benefits, differs radically from dietary patterns currently recommended in guidelines, particularly in terms of its recommendation to exclude grains, dairy, and nutritional products of industry. OBJECTIVE We evaluated whether a Paleolithic nutritional pattern improves risk ...

The evolution of the human diet over the past 10,000 years from a Paleolithic diet to our current modern pattern of intake has resulted in profound changes in feeding behavior. Shifts have occurred from diets high in fruits, vegetables, lean meats, and seafood to processed foods high in sodium and hydrogenated fats and low in fiber. These dietary changes have adversely affected dietary paramete...

Kapova Cave (Shulgan-Tash) is located in Bashkortostan, the Southern Urals, in the Shulgan Tash Reserve on the Belaya River. Its coordinates are 53°02’ N; 57°03’ W. It is a large karst three-level system of chambers, galleries and wells having the total length of 3323 m with vertical amplitude of 165 m. The karst system is characterized by large chambers and galleries, great dynamics of microcl...

Recent research suggests that traditional grain-based heart-healthy diet recommendations, which replace dietary saturated fat with carbohydrate and reduce total fat intake, may result in unfavorable plasma lipid ratios, with reduced high-density lipoprotein (HDL) and an elevation of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and triacylglycerols (TG). The current study tested the hypothesis that a grain-fre...

The Southern Levant is a pivotal area for the study of hominin paleoecology during the Lower Paleolithic, because of its location on the out-of-Africa dispersal route and its significant ecological diversity. Important information has been gained by archaeofaunal studies, which usually reveal that exploitation of diverse Mediterranean environments with woodlands, marshes and lake margins, repre...

Zooarchaeological research at Qesem Cave, Israel demonstrates that large-game hunting was a regular practice by the late Lower Paleolithic period. The 400- to 200,000-year-old fallow deer assemblages from this cave provide early examples of prime-age-focused ungulate hunting, a human predator-prey relationship that has persisted into recent times. The meat diet at Qesem centered on large game a...

Modern human dispersal into Europe is thought to have occurred with the start of the Upper Paleolithic around 50,000-40,000 y ago. The Levantine corridor hypothesis suggests that modern humans from Africa spread into Europe via the Levant. Ksâr 'Akil (Lebanon), with its deeply stratified Initial (IUP) and Early (EUP) Upper Paleolithic sequence containing modern human remains, has played an impo...

The Kudaro Paleolithic site complex in Southern Ossetia includes five species of felids: Panthera onca gombaszoegensis, P. spelaea, P. pardus, Felis silvestris and possibly Lynx lynx. The fossil jaguar P. onca gombaszoegensis was identified from the lowest stratigraphic level of the Middle Pleistocene (Likhvian = Holsteinian Interglacial). Remains of P. pardus and Felis silvestris were recovere...

In the Eurasian Upper Paleolithic after about 35,000 years ago, abstract or depictional images provide evidence for cognitive abilities considered integral to modern human behavior. Here we report on two abstract representations engraved on pieces of red ochre recovered from the Middle Stone Age layers at Blombos Cave in South Africa. A mean date of 77,000 years was obtained for the layers cont...