What did people eat for dinner tens of thousands of years ago? Many adherents of the so-called Paleo diet will tell you that our ancestors’ tables were high in meat and low in carbohydrates.
This diet is named after the Paleolithic period, about 2.5 million to 10,000 years ago. Early humans were hunter-gatherers rather than farmers. Evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University burneda book about the science of metabolism, says that it is a myth that everyone in this era had a diet high in meat. Instead, it was significantly changed and influenced by many factors such as climate, location, and season.
in 2021 annual review of nutrition, Ponzer and his colleague Brian Wood of the University of California, Los Angeles, explore what we can learn about ancestral diets by studying modern hunter-gatherers, such as the Hadza of northern Tanzania and the Aceh of Paraguay. I’m explaining. In an interview with Knowable Magazine, Pontzer explains why the Hadza’s amazingly seasonal and diverse diet is so different from common ancient dietary concepts.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What does the paleo diet look like today? How well do they capture the eating habits of our ancestors?
People have developed different versions, but the original Paleo diet is fairly meaty. The same is true for today’s Paleo diet, which is mostly very meaty, low-carb, and disrespectful of starchy vegetables, fruits, etc. that were only seasonally available before agriculture. Among them are even more extreme camps, which say that humans were once almost entirely carnivorous carnivores.
But our ancestors’ diets were quite diverse. We evolved as hunter-gatherers, so we hunt and gather whatever food is in your local environment. So there was a great deal of variation in what hunter-gatherers ate, depending on location and time of year.
For another, partly because of its variability, but partly because of people’s preferences, most hunter-gatherer diets contain a lot of carbohydrates. It was probably important throughout history and prehistory. The idea does not match any of the available evidence.
So how did “paleo” come to represent a high-meat, low-carb diet?
I think there are several reasons for that. You are a romantic representation of what hunting and gathering was like. If you look at the paleo diet website, there’s a sort of macho caveman view of the past that permeates much of what I read.
Many of the available archaeological and ethnographic data also have inherent biases. In the early 1900s, and even before, many ethnographic reports were written by men that focused on men’s work. I know This is because of the way many of these smaller societies divide work. Men hunt and women gather.
Moreover, the available ethnographic data are heavily biased towards very northern cultures, such as Arctic cultures. Warm climate cultures were the first cultures pushed out by farmers and tended to eat more meat. People who lived near the sea or flowing rivers ate a lot of fish and seafood. Populations that lived in woodlands or areas with abundant vegetation focused on eating plants.
The archaeological record also has a bias towards hunting. Stone tools and bones with cut marks – evidence of hunting – are very well preserved. No wooden sticks or plant debris.
