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- Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online delivers more than 67,000 titles spanning a range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. It includes documentaries, films, demonstrations, and other content types. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
- AnthroDish AnthroDish is a weekly podcast about the connections between food, culture, and identity through an anthropological lens. Each week a new guest joins me to discuss a food-related topic that relates to their expertise or experience.
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Paleonutrition
- The Evolution of Human Nutrition: Diets and Microbes in Primates (CARTA) Our project explores the nature of the primate microbiome with the goal of understanding the impacts of microbiomes on human evolution.
- The Evolution of Human Nutrition: Australopith Diets (CARTA) This presentation considers the fossils themselves and what they can teach us about the diets of our early hominin forebears. It focuses on a key part of human evolution, when our ancestors and near cousins, the australopiths, began to descend from the trees. By about four million years ago, Australopithecus had evolved thicker, flatter, relatively larger teeth than their predecessors, suggesting a change in diet from soft foods, like forest fruits, to harder or tougher ones, like nuts or leaves.
- The Evolution of Human Evolution: Fire, Starch, Meat and Honey (CARTA) Unlike all other free-living animals, human populations need to eat much of their food cooked. When and why this evolutionary commitment to the control of fire began is a fascinating evolutionary puzzle. We now know that cooking causes starch and meat to provide much extra energy; that cooked food saves so much eating time that it makes dedicated hunting possible; and that honey-eating by African hunter-gatherers offers a remarkable clue that the control of fire is an ancient habit.
- The Evolution of Human Nutrition: Current Hunter-Gatherer Diets (CARTA) Alyssa Crittenden (Univ of Nevada, Las Vegas) reports on the diet composition and foraging profiles of the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. The significance of meat, tubers, and honey is addresses and the role that these food items play in evolutionary models is explored.
- The Evolution of Human Nutrition: Neanderthal Diets (CARTA) We conclude that Neanderthal subsistence strategies varied with their local environments and included various combinations of plant and animal foods throughout their range.
- The Evolution of Human Nutrition: Archaic Human Diets (CARTA) What is the legacy of the human ecological footprint in deep time, and how might this legacy relate to the evolution of human social and energy networks?
- The Evolution of Human Nutrition: Agriculture's Impact on Human Evolution (CARTA) Beginning some ten to twelve thousand years ago, fully modern Homo sapiens began to alter their diets in ways that would profoundly impact their lives and livelihoods on a global scale.
- Survival: The Human Diet (The Leakey Foundation) Humans are the only animal whose survival depends on controlling fire. A critical adaptive benefit is that cooking leads to large increases in net energy gain compared to eating our food raw. While cooking originated sometime between two million and four hundred thousand years ago, we still do not know exactly when our ancestors first tamed fire.
- Lunch Break Science: Adaptation of Early Human Diet to the Environment (The Leakey Foundation) Meet Leakey Foundation grantee Chalachew Seyoum and explore the adaptation of early humans’ diet to their environments. He also discusses his discovery of the oldest Homo specimen, dated 2.8 Ma.
- Did Cooking Make Us Human? (streaming, Academic Video Online) An unexpected theory is emerging that may answer one of the great mysteries of our evolution: what caused the change from ape to man? Has our diet made us who we are?
- The Evolution Of Cooking: Studying Chimpanzee Cognition (WGBH Forum) Cooking is a universal human practice, and a complex behavior that involves multiple cognitive skills—such as patience, self-control, and causal reasoning. But the evolutionary origins of cooking are unclear. Examining chimpanzees' cognitive skills can illuminate the emergence of this uniquely human behavior.
- What's Cooking?: The Meat and Potatoes of Human Evolution (SAR) Jeanne Sept's lecture explores the relative importance of plant and animal foods in the diets of our early ancestors.
Nutrition
- Changing the Menu (streaming, Academic Video Online) Examines the development of prehistoric agriculture in the Pacific Rim. Dr. Alan Thorne presents the story of how people changed from hunters and gatherers to farmers and herders in Southeast Asia, China, and the Pacific islands off the coast of Asia. He shows how this process is still taking place in some of these areas.
Modern Diets & the Food Industry
- Overfed & undernourished (streaming, Academic Video Online) Overfed & Undernourished examines a global epidemic and our modern lifestyles through one boy's inspiring and personal journey to regain his health from the inside out. Interspersed with interviews and advice from leading health and wellbeing experts from around the world, along the way providing simple solutions, and ultimately asking the fundamental question ... are we really nourishing ourselves?
- In defense of food : based on the book by Michael Pollan (streaming, Academic Video Online) Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants." With those seven words, journalist Michael Pollan distills a career's worth of reporting into a prescription for reversing the damage being done to people's health by today's industrially-driven Western diet. Pollan offers a clear answer to one of the most urgent questions of our time: What should I eat to be healthy?
- King Corn (dvd) King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. In the film, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil.
- Super Size Me (DVD) Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock embarks on a journey to find out if fast food is making Americans fat. For 30 days he can't eat or drink anything that isn't on McDonald's menu; he must eat three square meals a day, he must eat everything on the menu at least once, and supersize his meal if asked. He treks across the country interviewing a host of experts on fast food and a number of regular folk while downing McDonald's to try and find out why 37% of American are now overweight. Spurlock's grueling diet spirals him into a metamorphosis that will make you think twice about picking up another Big Mac.
Podcasts
- The Dirt on Neanderthal Diets with Dr. Anna Goldfield (AnthroDish) I’m speaking this week with Dr. Anna Goldfield about what Neanderthal diets looked like and how that impacted their lives.
- The Raw Truth About Cooking with Rachel Carmody (SciCafe, AMNH) How has cooking given humans an evolutionary edge? And how is new research on the human microbiome challenging information listed on nutrition labels? Harvard University’s Rachel Carmody tackles these questions by studying the past, present, and potential future of how, and why, humans eat the way they do.
- Orangutans, Obesity, and Human Evolution (SciCafe, AMNH) While wild orangutans in the rainforests of Borneo feed on a remarkable variety of plant life, they also endure unpredictable cycles of feast and famine. Erin Vogel of Rutgers University explains how research on these primates’ diet and health may help us to better understand the evolution of early human diets, as well as provide insight into today’s global obesity epidemic.
