Life in the Paleolithic wasn’t a pristine, sterile existence. There were no fun-sized hand sanitizers or pasteurized eggs. Meat didn’t come shrink-wrapped, and it wasn’t stored in sub-40 degree temperature to prevent spoilage. I’ve never seen evidence of vegetable cleaning liquid containers at prehistoric dig sites, nor have any tiny tubes of antibiotic ointment been discovered among the arrowheads, flint shards, and stone spears. In fact, for the better part of human history, man was entirely ignorant of the existence of microorganisms, let alone the crucial role they played in our everyday lives. The Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro, in his 1st century BC book “On Agriculture,” wrote of “certain creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases,” but he was just guessing (the Romans used a pseudo-soap to occasionally remove […]
Original post by Mark Sisson
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