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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: I'm more in voc obam and you've likely heard of

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Speaker 1: the Paleo diet. The trendy regimen's name is short for

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Speaker 1: Paleolithic and supposedly mimics the nutrition of ancient humans who

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Speaker 1: lived about ten thousand years ago. Cave people ate meats, seafoods, nuts,

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Speaker 1: and a few fruits and vegetables. Oh and one other

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Speaker 1: food source that doesn't show up on today's protein focused

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Speaker 1: food blogs other people. Archaeologists in Western Europe have evidence

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Speaker 1: that the precursors to modern humans ate their neighbors during

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Speaker 1: the Paleolithic era. Most experts, though, have debated whether cannibalism

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Speaker 1: was essential for the survival of these hominins or whether

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Speaker 1: it was part of ritualistic ceremonies. To be classified as

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Speaker 1: nutritional cannibalism, the people that Paleolithic clans eight needed to

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Speaker 1: be well nutritious. So just how many calories are in

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Speaker 1: a thigh or an ear? Archaeologist James Cole of the

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Speaker 1: University of Brighton and in And decided to find out.

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Speaker 1: Think of the diagrams of cattle and pigs that illustrate

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Speaker 1: different cuts of meat, coal mapped out the human body,

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Speaker 1: then determined the cloric count within each segment, showing how

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Speaker 1: much energy they would transfer if consumed. The results were

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Speaker 1: published in the journal Scientific Reports. A thigh, for instance,

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Speaker 1: contains a hefty thirteen thousand, three hundred and fifty calories,

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Speaker 1: while the spleen is a modest hundred and thirty. Overall,

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Speaker 1: the average human body has anywhere from one hundred and

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Speaker 1: twenty five thousand to one hundred and forty four thousand

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Speaker 1: consumable calories. Some parts may take longer to digest. You'll

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Speaker 1: wrap up ten thousand, two hundred and eighty calories from

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Speaker 1: human skin alone, while others are snack size like the

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Speaker 1: kidneys and contain about three hundred and eighty calories. The brain,

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Speaker 1: spinal cord, and nerves were thinking as stew would be

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Speaker 1: the most appropriate cooking method. Here will provide you with

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Speaker 1: two thousand, seven hundred calories, and the bones contain about

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Speaker 1: twenty five thousand bone broth is so on trend right now,

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Speaker 1: after all, Despite all this talk of ancient eating habits,

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Speaker 1: Coal concluded other humans were probably not a nutritive meal

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Speaker 1: of choice compared to competing available food sources. One single

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Speaker 1: wily mammoth, for example, containing a whopping three point six

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Speaker 1: million calories, would have given an entire tribe food for

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Speaker 1: about eight weeks. A human, on the other hand, would

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Speaker 1: have provided enough calories for a tribe to subside for

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Speaker 1: only half a day, leaving everyone to wonder what's for

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Speaker 1: dinner after just a few hours. Cole concludes that because

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Speaker 1: of the relatively meager calorie counts of the human body,

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Speaker 1: people eight other people for social or cultural reasons, not

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Speaker 1: for their health. So modern paleo dieters can breathe a

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Speaker 1: sigh of relief their recipe books should continue to skip

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Speaker 1: this particular ingredient to Day's episode was written by Laurie L.

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Speaker 1: Dove and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this

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Speaker 1: and lots of other Food for Thought topics, visit our

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Speaker 1: home planet, hastaff works dot com. The