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Consider the caveman — or at least our cultural idea of what his life was like: Out hunting all day and bringing fresh meat home for the family. A ripped body from dragging rocks. An excellent sex life with lots of partners. The simplicity appeals to a society grappling with modern problems — a society that has supposedly progressed. So we try protein-rich Paleo-diets, run barefoot and sleep around, as if the cave people had it right all along. “To think of ourselves as misfits in our own time and of our own making flatly contradicts what we now understand about the way evolution works,” writes evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk in her new bookPaleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live. “Evolution can be fast, slow, or in-between … understanding what makes the difference is far more enlightening, and exciting, than holding our flabby modern selves up against a vision — accurate or not — of our well-muscled and harmoniously adapted ancestors.” There is a danger in thinking “we know more than we do about what we really were like,” she said in an interview Friday from Hawaii, where she is doing research on crickets. Sarah Boesveld looks at four paleofantasies and popular misconceptions about evolution she addresses in her book.