I’ve been reading a lot over the past year about paleo and primal diets, and one of the things that’s bothered me about most of it is the assumption that our paleolithic ancestors ate meat. Lots, and lots, and lots of meat. So much meat, in fact, that some paleo types eat almost nothing else (and, according to the New York Times, eat most of it raw. While fasting, running miles with no water, and donating lots of blood to simulate paleolithic bar brawls.). I’d wondered about that for some time, because while meat provides a lot of calories, hunting it takes a lot of calories, while plants just sit there and wait for you to eat them (even if some do require more intensive processing to make them edible).
A few months ago, I came across an article discussing Neanderthal veggie consumption that took such a tone of amazement that there’s archaeological evidence for such a thing that I wanted to do some research on it – especially since I had to admit that most of my knoweldge of the Neanderthal diet came from reading Clan of the Cave Bear. (My knowledge of early human diets is somewhat more academic – I didn’t study archaeology in undergrad, but I did study cultural anthropology, including modern forager societies.)
Anyway, this isn’t meant to be an extensive rundown of all of the evidence for and against the consumption of game meat, seafood, legumes, tubers, fruit, nuts, and/or wild grains by our pre-agrarian ancestors. But the more I read, the more I see that: A) Many archaeologists seem to have been more interested in what kind of meat our early ancestors ate than in what kind of veggies, which betrays the same bias that leads to the over-emphasis on hunting implicit in the term “hunter-gatherer”; B) As I suspected, there is no “typical” paleolithic diet. Humans are adaptable and omnivorous. We (like the cave bears we once worshiped) ate what we could find, kill or gather. That certainly included meat, but it included a variety of other foods, as well – something I think a lot of modern paleo enthusiasts have overlooked.
