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Pregnancy In The Stone Age – Can We Learn Something?

The woman who became pregnant during the Stone Age faced great risks compared to today’s mother. There was no way to control bleeding or infection; C-section was not an option. That we have survived as a species seems remarkable – until you dig a little deeper.

The outcome of pregnancy depends on the underlying health of the mother, nutrition before and during pregnancy and the threat of infection. In all these areas the woman of 50,000 years ago was better than her counterpart today. How is this possible in an era when there was no plumbing, no medical care and no protection against infectious diseases?

Better diet, better pregnancy

The primitive woman’s diet was less likely to be lacking in important nutrients than that of today’s young girls. (Ref 1) A study by the University of Cincinnati Medical Center confirmed earlier reports that teenage and adult pregnant women get too little iron, zinc, folate and vitamin E.

A woman who begins pregnancy without enough calcium, vitamin D and other bone-building nutrients increases her risk of developing osteoporosis in middle age. But that is not the end of the story. Her baby may also be at greater risk of fracture in the future. Osteoporosis of middle age is at least partially programmed before birth, especially if the mother smokes and has little physical activity. (Ref 2, 3, 4)

Most lay people believe that stone people were hearty meat eaters. Anthropologists know that this is not so. They lived on a predominantly meat diet for only about 100,000 years, from the time Homo sapiens developed keen hunting skills until the advent of farming. Before that time meat came from carrion and game. Most of their calories came from vegetables, fruits, roots and nuts.

Plant foods contain everything a pregnant woman needs, including vitamins, antioxidants, proteins and minerals. Modern vegetarians are often deficient in vitamin B12 but small game, bird eggs and the deliberate or accidental inclusion of insects in the Stone Age diet provided more than enough of this critical nutrient.

Folic acid deficiency in early pregnancy leads to defective formation of the baby’s brain and spinal cord. Those abnormalities are much less likely among the babies of mothers who get an adequate amount of folate, at least 400 micrograms per day. So few women eat enough green leafy vegetables to increase their folate levels, the US government requires bakery manufacturers to add it to their products.

Obstetricians have been prescribing multivitamins for their pregnant patients for decades but only in recent years have studies confirmed the wisdom of that practice. In 2002, the American Medical Association reversed a long-standing position and recommended that everyone, without exception, needs a multivitamin/multimineral preparation every day to avoid subtle but health-damaging inadequacies of these nutrients. Taking a multivitamin reduces the newborn’s risk of birth defects, especially those involving the heart. Preeclampsia is a serious, sometimes fatal complication of pregnancy. Women whose intake of vitamins C and E is low have a threefold greater risk of this condition. (Ref. 5, 6)

Would these mostly vegetarian early stone ages have become iron deficient? Not likely. Their diet was rich in iron and also in Vitamin C, which facilitates iron absorption. Under these conditions iron deficiency would have been rare. Cereal grains prevent iron absorption, which explains why iron deficiency is common in societies that live mainly on grains. However, one of the main reasons Stone Age women probably didn’t have iron deficiencies is that they didn’t have nearly as many menstrual cycles as modern women.

In a primitive society the onset of menstruation is about 5 years later than that of American girls. Modern hunter-gatherers, like the oldest Stone Age people, are either pregnant or nursing for most of their gestational years and only menstruate a few times between weaning one child and conceiving another. In those groups, breastfeeding does suppress ovulation because it is literally on demand, ie every few minutes, even throughout the night. For a modern breastfeeding mother, on demand often means no more often than every two hours and maybe once or twice a night after the third or fourth month. Thus periods return despite breastfeeding and monthly blood loss continues.

The fish-brain connection

Beginning about 150,000 years ago our ancestors discovered seafood. The increased intake of fatty acids in fish and shellfish initiated the great advance in brain size and complexity that allowed humans to progress more rapidly in the next 100,000 years than they had in the previous million. Huge gains in tool making and the development of language and group communication followed.

The human brain consists mostly of water but the solid part is mostly fat. The body cannot produce the omega-3 and omega-6 fats that make up so much of the structure of the brain and eye, so we need them in our diet. Maternal deficiency of these nutrients, especially omega-3, prevents the newborn’s brain and eyes from reaching their full potential. The best source of omega-3 fats is fish; nuts and leafy green vegetables are also good sources.

Omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are found in every cell of the body. They allow an efficient flow of nutrients, regulate nerve impulses and keep inflammation in proper balance. In a proper diet there is an equal amount of omega-3 and omega-6 fats. This allows the immune system to fight infection, a real threat that humans have faced from the Stone Age to the age of antibiotics, just 70 years ago.

The benefit for the baby of a diet rich in omega-3 fats is obvious, but mothers also need it. Nature protects the unborn baby by tapping into the mother’s stores of omega-3 fats. A woman whose intake of omega-3 fatty acids is low during the months and years before pregnancy will develop a deficiency of her own. This worsens with successful pregnancies if her omega-3 intake remains low. Postpartum depression affects about 10 percent of women after childbirth and it is associated with a lack of omega-3 fats. (Ref 7, 8)

The latest epidemic

There is one complication of pregnancy that never happened in the Stone Age: type 2 diabetes. No disease in modern times has risen so quickly. It has increased several times since the 1950s; between 1990 and 2001 it rose by 61 percent. Gestational diabetics (Ref. 9) are those who do not yet have the full disease but they cannot process blood sugar (glucose) properly during pregnancy. About half of them will develop frank diabetes in the years after giving birth to their baby.

Most of us are familiar with type 2 diabetes, which was once referred to as adult-onset diabetes, as the disease our grandparents developed in their later years. It is no longer uncommon to find it in teenagers, even in classes. As it seeped into the younger generation, it alarmed – but did not surprise – doctors to realize that it was no longer a rarity in obstetric practice.

How can we be so sure that the pregnant Stone Age didn’t have diabetes? This is a lifestyle disease that has three main associations: a low level of physical activity, a diet that is high in refined grains and sugars, and obesity. Those conditions simply did not occur during the Stone Age. Their lifestyle required strenuous effort. Grains of any kind were not part of their diet because they require tools and controlled heat. Sugar as we know it simply did not exist and honey was an occasional lucky find. Obesity would have been non-existent, as it is today among the planet’s dwindling hunter-gatherer populations.

Diabetic mothers have more complications of pregnancy than normal women. Their babies are 5 times more likely to die and 3 times more likely to be born with abnormalities of various organs.

They kept germs at bay

Common wisdom states that Stone Age humans were an infection-prone lot but that’s simply not true. They had powerful immune systems due to high levels of physical activity and a remarkably varied diet. Between the protective antibodies a mother passed across the placenta and those she gave to her newborn through breast milk, Stone Age babies had more protection against the germs of the day than modern babies.

Sexually transmitted diseases do not spread very far or very quickly when people live in small isolated groups as they did during the Stone Age. The probability that today’s pregnant female will have at least one of these infections is more than 50 percent (Ref. 10). The effect on babies can be severe; some die, some will be brainwashed.

Choice and consequences

Tobacco, alcohol and illegal drugs have produced a generation of babies with problems that stone age babies never faced. Mothers who smoke have babies who are smaller than the norm and whose brain development may be compromised. Alcohol or cocaine use by the mother during pregnancy results in stunted growth, birth defects and other severe problems.

Given a choice, none of us would want to live in a stone age world but we have neutralized the almost miraculous medical advances of the last century. We allowed our daughters to be less physically active and subsist on a marginal diet. If we could reverse those two factors alone, there would be a dramatic decrease in prematurity and other pregnancy complications.

The lessons we can learn from the Stone Age are not subtle, obscure, or beyond our ability to imitate them. We can produce the healthiest generation ever by making better choices for our children and ourselves.

Philip J. Goscienski, MD is the author of Health Secrets of the Stone Age, Better Life Publishers 2005. Contact him through his website at http://www.stoneagedoc.com.

References

1. Giddens JB et al., Pregnant adolescents and adult women have similarly low intakes of selected foods, J Am Diet Assoc 2000;100:1334-1340

2 Cooper C et al., Review: developmental origins of osteoporotic fracture, Osteoporosis Int 2006; 17(3):337-47

3 Prentice A et al., Nutrition and bone growth and development, Proc Nutr Soc 2006 Nov;65(4):348-60

4 Lanham SA et al., In utero programming of bone. Part I: alteration of the osteogenic environment, Osteoporos Int 2008 Feb;19(2):147-56

5 Keen CL et al., The Credibility of Micronutrient Deficiencies Being a Significant Contributing Factor to the Occurrence of Pregnancy Complications, Am Soc Nutr Sciences J Nutr 2003 May;133:1597S-1605S

6 Bodnar LM et al., Periconceptional multivitamin use reduces the risk of preeclampsia, Am J Epidemiol 2006 Sep 1; 164 (5): 470-7

7 Freeman MP, Omega-3 fatty acids and perinatal depression: a review of the literature and recommendations for future research, Prostaglandins Leukot Essenti Fatty Acids 2006 Oct-Nov; 75(4-5): 291-7

8 Kendall-Tackett K, A new paradigm for depression in new mothers: the central role of inflammation and how breastfeeding and anti-inflammatory treatments protect maternal mental health, Int Breastfeed J 2007; 2:6

9 Greene MF and Solomon CG, Gestational Diabetes Mellitus – Time to Treat, N Engl J Med 2005 Jun 16; 352 (24): 2544-46

10 Bazulo JG and Koutsky LA, The epidemiology of human papillomavirus infections, J Clin Virol 2005 Mar;32 Suppl 1:S16-24

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