Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians
Paleolithic diets have become all the rage, but are they getting our ancestral diet all wrong?
Right now, one half of all Americans are on a diet. The other half just gave up on their diets and are on a binge. Collectively, we are overweight, sick and struggling. Our modern choices about what and how much to eat have gone terribly wrong. The time has come to return to a more sensible way of eating and living, but which way? One group of self-help books suggests we give up carbohydrates, another that we give up fats, another still that we lay off the protein. Or maybe we should just eat the way our ancestors did. A new class of very popular self-help books recommends a return to the diets of our ancestors. Paleolithic diets, caveman diets, primal diets and the like, urge us to remember the good ole days. Taken too literally, such diets are ridiculous. After all, like all wild species, sometimes our ancestors starved to death and the starving to death diet, well, it ends badly. The past was no panacea; each generation we made due with the bodies and foods available, imperfect bodies and imperfect foods. But let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that it would be a good idea to eat like our ancestors ate. Just what did they eat?
Here is where the trouble starts. Collectively, anthropologists have spent many a career attempting to hone in on the diets of our most recent ancestors. Typically, they focus on our stone age (AKA Paleolithic) human ancestors or our earlier pre-human, hominid ancestors. Even if we just consider our stone age ancestors—those folks whose stories span the time between the first stone tool and the first agriculture—the sides of the debate are polarized. If you listen to one camp, our ancestors got most of their nutrition from gathered fruits and nuts; successful kills of big mammals may have been more of a treat than an everyday reality. A paper out just this month suggests that even Neanderthals–our north country cousins and mates– may have eaten much more plant material than previously suspected. Meanwhile, more macho camps of academics paint a picture of our ancestors as big, bad, hunters, who supplemented meaty diets with the occasional berry “chaser.” Others suggest we spent much of our recent past scavenging what the lions left behind, running in to snag a half-rotten wildebeest leg when the fates allowed. In other words, athough “Paleolithic” diets in diet books tend to be very meaty, reasonable minds disagree as to whether ancient, Paleolithic diets actually were. Fortunately, new research suggests answers (yes, plural) to the question of what our ancestors ate. Read more…