Haha I wasn't referring to the Paleolithic era my bad I'm terrible in history to begin with I'm more of a science type guy and I know that genetic mutation takes 100000s of years before making a significant impact on how our system works which in this case hasn't taken long enough (homo erectus to Homo sapiens somewhere in the 100k years ago I believe correct me if I am wrong) which is why I believe that the Paleo diet has merit in the fact if we eat what has been encoded into our DNA (what our ancestors eat Homo sapiens) it will be the most beneficial in terms of bodybuilding and healthy living. Although like everything you have to pick and choose from a little bit of everywhere and construct your own theories which as a history teacher you probably do try to tell us college students or high school or whatever level of institution! That's why I brought up porridge. I don't mean to come off as rude or anything I just wanted to express my opinion and thought on the Paléo diet because like op believes in we didn't eat a lot of sugar like that 1000 years ago
HS and college-both.
You are on the right track with time needed for any appreciable impact of a genetic mutation with respect to dietary impact.
Paleo, however, has too many fatal flaws for me to consider it a reasonable diet approach:
1) it has a fairly arbitrary and strict set of standards (what our ancestors supposedly ate) for which to deem a food "good" (and the notion of good food/bad food is flawed in and of itself)
2) it is based on a flawed anthropology of our ancestors-what did they really eat? Did they avoid legumes (no)? Etc
3) our paleo ancestors were lucky to see 20 years of age. Not sure I'd consider them the paragon of dietetic health
4) the diet ignores epigenetics: our environment has changed our genome. Even if we could identify the ideal diet that "worked" for our caveman forebearers, we are no longer genetically in the same lineage as them-what makes us think it will "work" for us
I could go on and on