Paper short abstract:

Traditional maize processing is used to test a new theoretical “ethnovore” construct involving the accumulation, transmission, and evolution of behaviors concerned with the transformation of raw food products into edible, nutrient rich foods with feedback effects on biological evolution.

Paper long abstract:

In the context of attempting to categorize the co-evolution of the human diet, it is increasingly apparent that the contemporary label of being an omnivore "who eats nearly everything" may not always lead us in directions that reveal much about the co-evolutionary process that has led to contemporary humanity. Being an omnivore is more of an abstraction about a potential than it is about the food that any specific people or society prescribes, proscribes and actually eats. Instead, if we look at human food consumption more holistically over time, it appears that we are more likely to be genetically evolved to become deeply rooted in a particular food tradition that is the product of an evolutionary process over time periods spanning generations to many millennia. This aspect of the human food system needs a new terminology to connect and integrate it into the meaningful continuum of abstractions that we are discovering about the biocultural origins of ethnic food traditions and their implications for the genetic and metabolic constraints of human diets. While omnivore is the broadest term we can apply to the potential of humanity's diet, we are really "ethnovores" in our individual, family, community and cultural values and behaviors. This paper develops this new concept and uses our work over the last several decades on the evolution of maize diets as an exemplar to test the significance of the ethnovore concept as a model for understanding this key evolutionary process.