Diet of Our Human Ancestors | Early European History And Religion

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WHAT PALEOLITHIC PEOPLE ATE

Argania spinosa nuts, a food eaten by prehistoric modern humans

In a review of “Prehistoric Cookery, Recipes and History,” by Jane Renfrew, Eleanor Cowie wrote in The Herald: “Consider these dishes: fish soup made from an entire fish, including the head and tail; grilled ox tails; slott (made from cod roe and flour); boiled samphire (a marsh plant); laverbread (bread made from seaweed); and boiled marrow bones....As frightening and unappealing as these dishes may sound, for our early ancestors they constituted everyday meals. [Source: Eleanor Cowie, The Herald; Glasgow, July, 2006 =^=]

“It is worth noting that not all recipes and foodstuffs in the book date from pre-history. In fact, most would have been devised by those living in Bronze Age Britain, after the introduction of agriculture. Renfrew acknowledges this and points to the difficulty in obtaining ingredients used in the palaeolithic period (800,000 to 10,000BC), such as rhino joints or mammoth steaks. There is also a dearth of archaeological evidence. Moreover, prehistoric humans are understood to have been huntergatherers; in otherwords they ate what they found or hunted, with little deviation or culinary fuss. Regardless of the animal on the chopping block, everything was used – udders, tripe, brains, head, feet, tails, blood and even gristle were made into dishes in the absence of any alternatives. Rather than cooking with elaborate sauces, spices or liquids, meat and fish was roasted with little interference on an open fire or spit. =^=

“Brian Ratcliffe, professor of nutrition at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, believes we ought to be wary of over- romanticising our ancestors’ diet. He maintains that hunter- gatherers – for instance palaeolithic man – had a nutrient- deficient diet compared to 21st-century man. The clearest evidence of this, he says, is that humans did not live for very long. “It is important to realise that whatever you are discussing about prehistoric nutrition and diet is speculative because of a shortage of written evidence, ” he says. “The most of what we can speculate about early man is that his diet would have been very restrictive. We are not talking about settled people; these early peoples would have lived nomadic lives. They would have had to follow the animals that they hunted for food. They were also restricted to the seasons; [people living in Britain] would have moved north in the summer to find food, fruits and berries, while in the winter they would have moved south. =^=

““Most of what we know was that they had to live hand to mouth. At that time they did not grow old – people were only living for a few decades, long enough to reproduce the next generation. I think there’s a lot of nonsense about modern human diet being so bad and looking to early man for lessons. Early man’s diet, particularly later when pastoralisation began, was full of nutritional deprivation, full of nutritional inadequacies. In order to eat, they had to follow the food supply and that was very changeable.” =^=

Book: “Prehistoric Cookery, Recipes and History,” by Jane Renfrew (English Heritage, 2006]

Websites and Resources on Hominins and Human Origins: Smithsonian Human Origins Program humanorigins.si.edu ; Institute of Human Origins iho.asu.edu ; Becoming Human University of Arizona site becominghuman.org ; Hall of Human Origins American Museum of Natural History amnh.org/exhibitions ; The Bradshaw Foundation bradshawfoundation.com ; Britannica Human Evolution britannica.com ; Human Evolution handprint.com ; University of California Museum of Anthropology ucmp.berkeley.edu; John Hawks' Anthropology Weblog johnhawks.net/ ; New Scientist: Human Evolution newscientist.com/article-topic/human-evolution

Paleolithic Diet and Health

Dr. Gifford-Jones wrote: “ Dr. Barry Bogin is a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. He says we all envision our Paleolithic ancestors as being short, bent-over people with small brains, but actually, they were a tad taller and with brains as large as ours. And if alive today, they would not require hospitalization for so much degenerative disease. Admittedly, most stone-age people did not live as long as today’s North Americans. Large numbers died while hunting animals or from infection due to lack of antibiotics. Others suffered terrible deaths from childbirth. But the ones that escaped these problems did not face cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, or obesity—all of today’s big killers—later in life. What protected them? Ironically, it was the things they lacked that saved them. Three meals a day were never guaranteed, so they had to continually exert themselves to find food. Dr. Bogin reports that today most people expend only 400 calories to complete the day’s chores. Cars, television sets, and computers don’t burn up calories. Stone-age people lost 1,600 calories by hunting and gathering food. This kept them thin, a major factor in preventing degenerative disease. [Source:Dr. Gifford-Jones, M.D., Epoch Times, September 10, 2014 \~]

“Nutritional anthropologists can pinpoint what stone-age people ate—and how their nutrition safeguarded them from certain diseases—by analyzing their bones and fossilized human waste. Possibly, their major protection was the lack of sugar. The only source of pure sugar was honey, which was not easy to get and only available in certain areas a few months of the year. Today, we consume 20 teaspoons of sugar daily, which translates into 146,000 calories a year and 42 pounds of body fat if it’s not burned up by exercise. What’s beyond belief is that Americans now eat more refined sugar in a single day than stone-age people ate in a lifetime! This is one reason why stone-age people were free of cavities. Stone-age people also lacked excessive sodium. They consumed about 1,000 milligrams of sodium daily. Today, we use from 4,000 to 6,000 milligrams every day, mostly from supermarket foods. This is one reason why hypertension is a leading cause of death. \~\

“Paleolithic men consumed up to 150 grams of fiber daily due to a diet rich in plant food. This triggered large soft stools and prevented constipation, diverticulitis, and possibly colon cancer. North Americans consume a mere 15 grams of fiber daily. Dr. Bogin says they were also not exposed to saturated fats, the type linked to coronary disease.\~\

“Paleolithic people didn’t eat significant amounts of saturated fat even in areas where game was abundant. The bison, which roamed the prairies, were thin, and what fat they contained was largely unsaturated fat. In fact, Dr. Bogin claims some of their fat consisted of omega-3 fatty acids, the kind found in fish. Paleolithic people also escaped osteoporosis. This, in spite of the fact that cows and goats were not herded for dairy products. But their plant foods were so high in calcium that they averaged 1,900 milligrams of calcium a day.” \~\

Plant-Based Diet of Modern Humans in Morocco 14,000 Years Ago

Research published in April 2024 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution on a the Iberomaurusians, hunter-gatherers who buried their dead in Taforalt cave in what’s now Morocco between 13,000 and 15,000 years ago, adds to evidence that modern humans living at that time mainly had a plant-based, rather than meat-based diet.. Scientists determined that the perhistoric Moroccans ate mainly plants by analyzing chemical signatures preserved in bones and teeth belonging to at least seven different Iberomaurusian. [Source: Katie Hunt, CNN, April 30, 2024]

“Our analysis showed that these hunter-gatherer groups, they included an important amount of plant matter, wild plants to their diet, which changed our understanding of the diet of pre-agricultural populations,” said lead study author Zineb Moubtahij, a doctoral student at Géosciences Environnement Toulouse, a research institute in France, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

According to CNN: The share of plant resources as a source of dietary protein in the humans whose remains were studied was similar to that seen in early farmers from the Levant, the present-day Eastern Mediterranean countries where plant domestication and farming were first documented. However, the Iberomaurusians weren’t strict vegetarians, the study noted. Cut marks on the remains of Barbary sheep and gazelles, as well as ancient horselike and cowlike mammals, suggested that some animals had been butchered and processed for food. The increased reliance on plant food was probably driven by several factors — including a wider range of edible plants and perhaps a depletion of large game species, according to the study.

Researchers also spotted a higher number of tooth cavities among the Taforalt specimens than is typically seen with hunter-gatherer remains of that period. The evidence suggested that the Iberomaurusians consumed “fermentable starchy plants” such as wild cereals or acorns, according to the study. coauthor Klervia Jaouen, a researcher at Géosciences Environnement Toulouse said that in the Levant region, archaeologists had documented a similar plant-based diet among another group that practiced a hunting-and-gathering lifestyle just before the development of agriculture, raising questions as to why the transition to farming did not simultaneously occur among the Iberomaurusian population.

The findings raise some intriguing questions about how agriculture spread across different regions and populations. “While not all individuals primarily obtained their proteins from plants at Taforalt, it is unusual to document such a high proportion of plants in the diet of a pre-agricultural population,” said Jaouen. “This is likely the first time such a significant plant-based component in a Paleolithic diet has been documented using isotope techniques,” Jaouen added.

The isotope analysis also detected evidence of one case of early weaning, with starchy plant foods introduced into an infant’s diet before its death at between 6 and 12 months old. This contrasts with hunter-gatherer societies where extended breast-feeding periods are the norm due to the limited availability of weaning foods,” according to the study.

Cooking in Prehistoric Times

There is heated archaeological debate about which hominins first started cooking. According to Slate: Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist at Harvard, claims that hominins became people — that is, acquired traits like big brains and dainty jaws — by mastering fire. He places this development at about 1.8 million years ago. This is an appealing premise no matter who you are. For those who see cooking as morally, culturally, and socially superior to not cooking, it is scientific validation of a worldview: proof that cooking is literally what makes us human. For the rest of us, it means we have a clever retort the next time one of those annoying raw-food faddists starts going on about how natural it is never to eat anything heated above 115 degrees Fahrenheit. [Source: Slate, October 5, 2010]

Zach Zorich wrote in Archaeology Magazine: Burned vegetable remains from Franchthi Cave in Greece and Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq are revealing that Middle and Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers cooked plants many thousands of years before the advent of agriculture. A team including archaeobotanist Ceren Kabukcu of the University of Liverpool found that people in the two caves used food preparation techniques that were remarkably similar, despite the 60,000 years separating them; Shanidar Cave was occupied by Neanderthals between 75,000 and 70,000 years ago, while Franchthi Cave was used from 11,700 to 11,400 years ago. [Source: Zach Zorich, Archaeology Magazine, May/June 2023]

The researchers employed reflected light and scanning electron microscopes to identify the species of carbonized plants. They found that the remains in both caves included oat and barley seeds as well as peas, pistachios, almonds, and wild mustard. Several of these plants would have had to be soaked in water and crushed to remove toxins before they could be eaten. In some cases, different plants were combined into a single dish. Many of the plants would have had a bitter taste, and wild mustard has a particularly sharp flavor. According to Kabukcu, these people weren’t just gathering foods with the most calories. “They go out and seek specific flavors and eat the things that they like,” she says.

Using Teeth to Determine Hominin Diets

a simple Paleo diet meal

In a review of the book, “Evolution’s Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins” by Peter S. Ungar, Laurence A. Marschall wrote in Natural History magazine:” The fossil jaws of prehistoric hominins have stories to tell, and they speak most eloquently to such paleoanthropologists as University of Arkansas professor Peter Ungar. What did our ancestors eat? Did they gather food or cultivate crops? What diseases did they suffer from? The answers are found in their teeth, if one knows where to look. [Source: Laurence A. Marschall, Natural History magazine, May 2017]

Some clues are obvious, even to the untrained eye — our ancestors evolved to eat a wide variety of foods: we bear both the sharp bladed teeth of dogs and lions and the flat molars of cows and hippos. While natural selection favors adaptations that help organisms find edible food in challenging times, an animal’s daily diet depends primarily on what foods are available on a typical day.

To narrow down what our ancestors ate, rather than what they could have eaten, Ungar looks to what he calls “foodprints,” subtle traces of wear or chemical alteration that show up using modern analytical tools. Under the high magnification of a scanning electron microscope, fossil teeth reveal a spectrum of pits and scratches, whose texture and complexity can be compared to similar scans of living creatures. It’s interesting that these close looks often belie first impressions: the teeth of Parantropus boisei, an eastern African hominin whose wide, flat teeth and massive jaw muscles earned it the nickname “nutcracker,” showed smooth surfaces more typical of fruit-eating monkeys, rather than the heavily scarred surfaces produced by grinding hard seed. “If the nutcracker cracked nuts, there was no sign of it in the microwear,” Ungar observes.

Chemical foodprints allow even finer distinctions to be drawn. The ratio of heavy-to-light carbon isotopes in teeth depends on whether a person’s diet included such seed grasses as maize, or whether it relied more heavily on fruits or root vegetables. These indexes, in turn, provide evidence for shifts from foraging to agriculture, and even for the emergence of cooking (which softens food and reduces tooth wear for a given type of diet chemistry).

Book: “Evolution’s Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins” by Peter S. Ungar Princeton University Press (2017)

Why It Was Though Prehistoric People Mainly Ate Meat

Recent research has undermined the idea that a Stone Age diet was meat-based.— an assumption perpetuated by present-day dietary trends like the Paleo diet. A November 2022 study, for example. revealed that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens were sophisticated cooks, combining plant-based ingredients such as wild nuts, peas, vetch, lentils and wild mustard. [Source: Katie Hunt, CNN, April 30, 2024]

The stereotype also likely has its roots in past research. Katie Hunt of CNN wrote: Evidence for meat-eating, in the form of butchered animal bones, is often more “archaeologically visible” than the evidence for plant eating, said Briana Pobiner, a research scientist and museum educator at the Human Origins Program in the department of anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. She wasn’t involved in the study.

Another reason for the idea that meat was central to early human diets is “the perception that hunting was a key behavioral innovation that occurred early in our evolutionary history — rooted in part in early hunter-gatherer studies carried out by male scholars that primarily focused on big game hunting by men and did not document, discounted, or downplayed the important dietary role of women gathering smaller game and plant resources,” she said via email.

“These findings indicate that several populations at the end of the Paleolithic adopted a diet similar in terms of plant content to that of farmers,” she said. The transition to agriculture was a complex process that occurred at different times and proceeded at different rates, in different ways with different foods, in different places, Pobiner said. “In other words, it was largely a local phenomenon that could involve transitional forms of subsistence — not a single, sharp, simultaneous worldwide shift,” she added. “I don’t think that there is a standard diet for everyone (in this period), but it depends on the environment. Humans are resilient and flexible in their diet habits,” Moubtahij said.

Dietary Differences Between Modern Human and Neanderthals

Neanderthal food?

Ewen Callaway wrote in NewScienceLife: “Chemical signatures locked into bone suggest the Neanderthals got the bulk of their protein from large game, such as mammoths, bison and reindeer. The anatomically modern humans that were living alongside them had more diverse tastes. As well as big game, they also had a liking for smaller mammals, fish and seafood. “It seems modern humans had a much broader diet, in terms of using fish or aquatic birds, which Neanderthals didn’t seem to do,” says Michael Richards, a biological anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and the University of British Columbia in Canada.” [Source: Ewen Callaway, NewScienceLife, August 12, 2009]

“Because our bones are constantly destroyed and rebuilt while we are alive, the atoms that make up collagen hold a record of what we’ve eaten. “When you take a sample of a bone you’re getting all those breakfasts, lunches and dinners for 20 years,” Richards says. Measurements of the abundance of heavy isotopes of carbon and nitrogen hold the key. Marine environments contain a higher proportion of heavy carbon atoms (carbon-13) than land ecosystems, so lots of carbon-13 in the recovered collagen points to a seafood diet. Meanwhile, heavy nitrogen (nitrogen-15) tends to build up as the atom moves up the food chain, from plants to herbivores to carnivores. **

“High levels of heavy nitrogen can also come from a diet with lots of freshwater fish. Aquatic food webs tend to contain more steps than terrestrial ecosystems, so large fish often have higher levels of heavy nitrogen than land predators. By comparing the relative levels of these isotopes with those of animals found nearby, researchers can sketch the broad outlines of an ancient diet, if not every last calorie. **

“Carbon and nitrogen isotopes suggest that Neanderthals living between 37,000 and 120,000 years ago in what are now France, Germany, Belgium and Croatia got the bulk of their protein from large land herbivores, Richards and Trinkaus conclude. Levels of heavy nitrogen in Neanderthal bones invariably exceed levels in surrounding herbivores, and tend to match levels in that period’s carnivores, such as hyenas. Some modern humans living between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago opted for more varied diets. High levels of carbon-13 in two samples from Italy and France are evidence for a diet that probably included some marine fish or seafood. **

According to Plos One: “When fluctuating climates in the Ice Age altered habitats, modern humans may have adapted their diets in a different way than Neandertals, according to a study published in PLOS ONE by Sireen El Zaatari of the University of Tübingen, Germany, and colleagues. [Source: Plos One press release, popular-archaeology.com, April 27, 2016 \^^/]

modern human food?

“They found that as the climate fluctuated and habitats altered, Neandertals may have adapted their diet to the resources that were most readily available, eating mainly meat when in open, cold steppe environments, and supplementing their diet with more plants, seeds, and nuts when in forested landscapes. Meanwhile, modern humans seemed to stick to their dietary strategy regardless of slight environmental changes and retained a relatively large proportion of plant-based foods in their diet. “To be able to do this, they may have developed tools to extract dietary resources from their environment”” says Sireen El Zaatari. The researchers concluded that Upper Paleolithic modern humans’ differing dietary strategies may have given them an advantage over the Neandertals. \^^/

“The Neandertals may have maintained their opportunistic approach of eating whatever was available in their changing habitats over hundreds of thousands of years. However, modern humans seem to have invested more effort in accessing food resources and significantly changed their dietary strategies over a much shorter period of time, in conjunction with their development of tools, which may have given them an advantage over Neanderthals. \^^/

“The European Neandertal and modern human individuals analysed in this study do not temporally overlap and thus would not inform us about direct dietary competition between these two groups. Nevertheless, if the behavioral differences detected in this study were already established at the time of contact between them, these differences might have contributed to the demise of the Neandertals and the survival of modern humans.” \^^/

Paleo Diet

A Stone Age diet “is the one and only diet that ideally fits our genetic makeup,” writes Loren Cordain, an evolutionary nutritionist at Colorado State University, in his book “The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Adherents to the so-called "caveman" diet argue that a return to the hunter-gatherer foods of the Stone Age — emphasizing meats, and eliminating most grains -- could reduce health problems like obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. [Source: National Geographic, AFP]

Rob Lever of AFP wrote, “ The Paleo diet movement is backed by some academics and fitness gurus, and has gained some praise in medical research in the U.S. and elsewhere even though it goes against recommendations of most mainstream nutritionists and government guidelines. Some aspects of the Paleo diet are widely accepted, such as shunning many refined and processed starches and sugars in favor of fresh fruits, nuts and vegetables. But the controversy stems from its elimination of most cereals, legumes and dairy products, relying instead on high-protein meats, fish and eggs." [Source: Rob Lever, AFP, September 14, 2011]

“The Paleo diet has a devoted following, some who link it to improved fitness and longevity, including Arthur De Vany, a 74-year-old former economics professor who promotes vigorous workouts and wrote a 2010 book, "The New Evolution Diet: What Our Paleolithic Ancestors Can Teach Us about Weight Loss, Fitness, and Aging." "Our forager ancestors sought out high-energy (meaning high-calorie, high-fat) foods that could be obtained at the lowest energy cost," De Vany says in his book. "We began getting heavier and developing new diseases once we ceased to be hunter-gatherers and instead became farmers -- or more specifically once we started eating the food we grow rather than gathering food."

“One study published in the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology showed a Paleolithic diet "improved glycemic control and several cardiovascular risk factors compared to a diabetes diet." A Swedish study published in the Journal Nutrition and Metabolism found that a Stone Age diet is "more satiating per calorie than a Mediterranean-like diet," making it something to be considered in fighting obesity.”

Ann Gibbons wrote in National Geographic: “ After studying the diets of living hunter-gatherers and concluding that 73 percent of these societies derived more than half their calories from meat, Cordain came up with his own Paleo prescription: Eat plenty of lean meat and fish but not dairy products, beans, or cereal grains—foods introduced into our diet after the invention of cooking and agriculture. Paleo-diet advocates like Cordain say that if we stick to the foods our hunter-gatherer ancestors once ate, we can avoid the diseases of civilization, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, even acne. “That sounds appealing. But is it true that we all evolved to eat a meat-centric diet? Both paleontologists studying the fossils of our ancestors and anthropologists documenting the diets of indigenous people today say the picture is a bit more complicated. The popular embrace of a Paleo diet, Ungar and others point out, is based on a stew of misconceptions. [Source: Ann Gibbons, National Geographic, September 2014 /*/]

Millions of people in the United States and elsewhere have practiced the Paleo diet, at least for a time, based on books sales and Internet hits. "It was an obscure idea 10 years ago, and in the last two to three years it has become known worldwide," Cordain, one the leading academics backing the Paleo diet, told AFP in 2011. "There are at least a half-dozen books on the best seller list that are promoting this," he added. [Source: Rob Lever, AFP, September 14, 2011]

Rob Lever of AFP wrote, “The underlying basis for the Stone Age diet is a belief that homo sapiens evolved into modern humans with a hunter-gatherer diet that promoted brain function and overall health. Backers say the human genome is essentially unchanged from the end of the Paleolithic era 10,000 years ago after evolving over millions of years. "It's intuitive," Cordain said. "Obviously you can't feed meat to a horse, you can't feed hay to a cat. The reason for that is that their genes were shaped in different ecological niches." He said peer-reviewed research has shown the Paleo diet better than the Mediterranean diet, US government recommendations and diets aimed at controlling adult diabetes.

Proponents and Critics of the Paleo Diet

“But a US News survey of nutritionists ranked the Paleo diet last among 20 possible options, far below the Mediterranean, vegan or Weight Watchers diets. It noted that the Paleo diet gets 23 percent of calories from carbohydrates compared to 45 to 65 percent in US government recommendations, and that the Stone Age regime is higher than recommended for protein and fat. "While its focus on veggies and lean meat is admirable, experts couldn't get past the fact that entire food groups, like dairy and grains, are excluded on Paleo diets," US News said. Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, told AFP that the Paleo diet "would not be appropriate for today's sedentary lifestyles."

“Nestle and others also dispute some of the historical claims of Paleo diet advocates. "The claim that half the calories in the Paleolithic diet came from meat is difficult to confirm," she said. In a research paper, Nestle said the life expectancy of Stone Age man was around 25 years "suggesting that the Paleolithic diet, among other life conditions, must have been considerably less than ideal." Cordain argues however that there are modern societies of hunter-gatherers where the theory can be tested. In these societies, "elderly people have been shown to be generally free of the signs and symptoms of chronic disease (obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels) that universally afflict the elderly in Western societies," he says on his blog."When these people adopt Western diets, their health declines and they begin to exhibit signs and symptoms of 'diseases of civilization.'"

“Cordain acknowledges that because of the way society has evolved, it is impractical to feed the world with Paleo diets because many societies have become dependent on cereals. But he says it can be successfully used in many Western countries, and argues that despite jokes about the Stone Age, mainstream nutritionists will come around to his conclusions. "This is not a fad, this is not Fred Flintstone, this is the wave of the future," he said.”

Early Modern Human Hunting and Gathering

Many scientists believe that early modern humans were more likely hunters and gatherers than macho spear-welding hunters. Basing their conclusions on archaeological evidence and studies of modern hunters and gatherers, the scientists believe that early human women collected edible plants, seeds and roots and men more likely employed relatively safe net hunting than threw spears at mighty beasts. [Source: Discovery, April 1998]

In modern hunter-gatherer societies, most of the calories come from the women's work. Men often come home empty-handed, which means that it falls to the women to provide much of the food. The scientists that have presented this view made these conclusions based on several theories and facts: 1) Hunter gatherers rarely go after big animals like elephants. Before the 5th century B.C. there is no evidence of pre-iron-age tribal hunters in Africa or Asia making a living from killing large animals. 2) Fiber technology was around at least 7,000 years ago, and evidence of mesh have been found at 20,000 year-old European sites, suggesting that nets like those used by pygmies to catch animals could have been used that long ago.

3) Evidence of fibers and plant foods are more likely or deteriorate than large bones, explaining why there isn't much evidence of plant foods and fibers. 4) Pollen samples from European Ice Age sites contains pollen from 70 plants. These plants are almost the same as those eaten by sub-Arctic people today. 5) Large bones found in caves were just as likely to have scavenged as from hunted animals. The bones found at archaeological sites was often weathered at different rates and found near natural salt licks and water holes (were animals often die) which suggests it may have been scavenged.

Meshlike impressions on clay fragments from Pavlov Hills, Czech Republic may have been from nets used to catch small game such as hares, foxes and squirrels. A number of sites in the Czech Republic have large numbers of hare bones. Hares would be difficult to catch without nets.

In any case as glaciers began retreating at the end of the last Ice Age around 12,000 years ago — when large swath of grassland were replaced by forest and luge herds of mammoths and other grazing creatures began to disappear — hunters changed their basic strategy from big game hunting to more generalized hunting, fishing and gathering. The favored weapon changed from the long spear to bow and arrow, which was more suitable in the confined spaces of the forest. Favored prey included deer and wild boar, both of which like forests, grow fast, reproduce steadily and can easily replenish themselves when they are hunted. Deer were favorite subjects in ancient cave paintings and their remains have been found in many places.

Hunter Gatherer Diet

The Hadza of Tanzania are the world’s last full-time hunter-gatherers. They live on what they find: game, honey, and plants, including tubers, berries, and baobab fruit. Ann Gibbons wrote in National Geographic: ““Year-round observations confirm that hunter-gatherers often have dismal success as hunters. The Hadza and Kung bushmen of Africa, for example, fail to get meat more than half the time when they venture forth with bows and arrows. This suggests it was even harder for our ancestors who didn’t have these weapons. “Everybody thinks you wander out into the savanna and there are antelopes everywhere, just waiting for you to bonk them on the head,” says paleoanthropologist Alison Brooks of George Washington University, an expert on the Dobe Kung of Botswana. No one eats meat all that often, except in the Arctic, where Inuit and other groups traditionally got as much as 99 percent of their calories from seals, narwhals, and fish. [Source: Ann Gibbons, National Geographic, September 2014 /*/]

Bushman making fire

“So how do hunter-gatherers get energy when there’s no meat? It turns out that “man the hunter” is backed up by “woman the forager,” who, with some help from children, provides more calories during difficult times. When meat, fruit, or honey is scarce, foragers depend on “fallback foods,” says Brooks. The Hadza get almost 70 percent of their calories from plants. The Kung traditionally rely on tubers and mongongo nuts, the Aka and Baka Pygmies of the Congo River Basin on yams, the Tsimane and Yanomami Indians of the Amazon on plantains and manioc, the Australian Aboriginals on nut grass and water chestnuts. /*/

““There’s been a consistent story about hunting defining us and that meat made us human,” says Amanda Henry, a paleobiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. “Frankly, I think that misses half of the story. They want meat, sure. But what they actually live on is plant foods.” What’s more, she found starch granules from plants on fossil teeth and stone tools, which suggests humans may have been eating grains, as well as tubers, for at least 100,000 years—long enough to have evolved the ability to tolerate them. The notion that we stopped evolving in the Paleolithic period simply isn’t true. Our teeth, jaws, and faces have gotten smaller, and our DNA has changed since the invention of agriculture. “Are humans still evolving? Yes!” says geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania.” /*/

Rain Forest Diet

Ann Gibbons wrote in National Geographic: “It’s suppertime in the Amazon of lowland Bolivia, and Ana Cuata Maito is stirring a porridge of plantains and sweet manioc over a fire smoldering on the dirt floor of her thatched hut, listening for the voice of her husband as he returns from the forest with his scrawny hunting dog.“With an infant girl nursing at her breast and a seven-year-old boy tugging at her sleeve, she looks spent when she tells me that she hopes her husband, Deonicio Nate, will bring home meat tonight. “The children are sad when there is no meat,” Maito says through an interpreter, as she swats away mosquitoes. [Source: Ann Gibbons, National Geographic, September 2014 /*/]

“Nate left before dawn on this day in January with his rifle and machete to get an early start on the two-hour trek to the old-growth forest. There he silently scanned the canopy for brown capuchin monkeys and raccoonlike coatis, while his dog sniffed the ground for the scent of piglike peccaries or reddish brown capybaras. If he was lucky, Nate would spot one of the biggest packets of meat in the forest—tapirs, with long, prehensile snouts that rummage for buds and shoots among the damp ferns. /*/

“This evening, however, Nate emerges from the forest with no meat. At 39, he’s an energetic guy who doesn’t seem easily defeated—when he isn’t hunting or fishing or weaving palm fronds into roof panels, he’s in the woods carving a new canoe from a log. But when he finally sits down to eat his porridge from a metal bowl, he complains that it’s hard to get enough meat for his family: two wives (not uncommon in the tribe) and 12 children. Loggers are scaring away the animals. He can’t fish on the river because a storm washed away his canoe. /*/

“The story is similar for each of the families I visit in Anachere, a community of about 90 members of the ancient Tsimane Indian tribe. It’s the rainy season, when it’s hardest to hunt or fish. More than 15,000 Tsimane live in about a hundred villages along two rivers in the Amazon Basin near the main market town of San Borja, 225 miles from La Paz. But Anachere is a two-day trip from San Borja by motorized dugout canoe, so the Tsimane living there still get most of their food from the forest, the river, or their gardens. /*/

Upper Amazon tribe members in the early 20th century

“A villager named José Mayer Cunay, 78, who, with his son Felipe Mayer Lero, 39, has planted a lush garden by the river over the past 30 years. José leads us down a trail past trees laden with golden papayas and mangoes, clusters of green plantains, and orbs of grapefruit that dangle from branches like earrings. Vibrant red “lobster claw” heliconia flowers and wild ginger grow like weeds among stalks of corn and sugarcane. “José’s family has more fruit than anyone,” says Rosinger. Yet in the family’s open-air shelter Felipe’s wife, Catalina, is preparing the same bland porridge as other households. When I ask if the food in the garden can tide them over when there’s little meat, Felipe shakes his head. “It’s not enough to live on,” he says. “I need to hunt and fish. My body doesn’t want to eat just these plants.” /*/

“On my last afternoon visiting the Tsimane in Anachere, one of Deonicio Nate’s daughters, Albania, 13, tells us that her father and half-brother Alberto, 16, are back from hunting and that they’ve got something. We follow her to the cooking hut and smell the animals before we see them—three raccoonlike coatis have been laid across the fire, fur and all. As the fire singes the coatis’ striped pelts, Albania and her sister, Emiliana, 12, scrape off fur until the animals’ flesh is bare. Then they take the carcasses to a stream to clean and prepare them for roasting.

“Nate’s wives are cleaning two armadillos as well, preparing to cook them in a stew with shredded plantains. Nate sits by the fire, describing a good day’s hunt. First he shot the armadillos as they napped by a stream. Then his dog spotted a pack of coatis and chased them, killing two as the rest darted up a tree. Alberto fired his shotgun but missed. He fired again and hit a coati. Three coatis and two armadillos were enough, so father and son packed up and headed home. As family members enjoy the feast, I watch their little boy, Alfonso, who had been sick all week. He is dancing around the fire, happily chewing on a cooked piece of coati tail” /*/

Is Variety The Key to a True, Healthy Paleo Diet

Professor Brian Ratcliffe, a professor of nutrition at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, has argued that the most important lesson to be learned from how our hominin ancestors ate is that a restricted diet is not good. “The main lesson is that as humans we need a huge variety of food from a range of different sources and food groups, ” he says. “We can see from early man’s experience that it is not good enough to rely upon single sources and single groups of foods because they did not give them the nutrients they needed. [In the Iron Age] the diet was largely meat and cereal-based and would have been nutritionally deficient in vitamin C, and they would certainly have had problems with calcium and vitamin D. There would still have been deprivations, crops failures and famines resulting from those failures, and disease within animals. In other words, [farming man] had an existence that was full of supply problems, like his predecessors.” [Source: Eleanor Cowie, The Herald; Glasgow, July,2006]

rain forest fruit (wild guava)

With the introduction of agriculture from onwards, people moved from being hunter-gatherers to farmers to controlling their supply of food. Professor Ratcliffe said: “As humans move into the agricultural period, they moved to using a staple food. “This staple was a cropbased food which provided most of the energy and protein needs. But what we see here is that there was a trade-off taking place. Growing crops provided some constancy in food supply, but the problem was that people had to stay in one area and so they were derived of the benefits of gleaning foods, like fruits and so on, from other areas as their hunter-gatherer ancestors would have done. The upshot of this was that they became very reliant on these staple foods.

“The other problem with this reliance on one staple is it tended to be focused on one or two grains. They did not have the multiplicity of crops that we have now, and their yields would have been much lower. People would have had to expend a lot of energy for relatively low-yielding crops.”

Dr Kerri McPherson, lecturer in evolutionary psychology at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, argues that from an evolutionary perspective eating behaviours in mankind have not changed that significantly. “Humans have developed different foods to eat, ” she says. “We have moved away from natural food to a more processed diet, a process which started with the introduction of agriculture about 100,000 years ago. But we have not physiologically evolved to cope with the change. Basically our environmental evolution has moved too quickly for the human species. The psychological mechanisms involved with food and eating behaviours have not caught up with the change in foods that we eat. We have been designed to cope with feast or famine, but the problem is that we don’t live in those times any more. The psychology that drives us to eat is still preparing us for the famine, encouraging us to overeat.”

Professor Ratcliffe adds: “For our generation the threats to life and quality of life depend on eating too much salt or fat. Early [Iron Age] man was not concerned about such matters because he did not live long enough to be so. When man started using salt to preserve food, he was not worrying about the effects of eating too much of it. Today our concerns are very different; we are focused on eradicating diseases like cancer and how different food could help that as well as reducing a person’s risk of getting it.”

Book: “Prehistoric Cookery, Recipes and History,” by Jane Renfrew (English Heritage, 2006]

Hunter-Gatherers Use Same Amount of Energy as Modern Life-Style Westerners?

Popular Archaeology reported: “Results from a new study published in the July 25, 2012 issue of PLoS ONE reveal that there is no difference between the energy expenditure of modern hunter-gatherers and Westerners, challenging the widely accepted theory that today’s sedentary lifestyle in Western countries is the reason for rising obesity levels. The findings are also significant for understanding our relationship to our ancient hunter-gatherer past, as the study subjects are members of a modern-day hunter-gatherer population that is believed to closely reflect the way our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors once lived. [Source: populararchaeology, July 25,2012 The study: Pontzer H, Raichlen DA, Wood BM, Mabulla AZP, Racette SB, et al. (2012) Hunter-Gatherer Energetics and Human Obesity. PLoS ONE 7(7): e40503. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0040503 \=/]

“Led by Herman Pontzer of Hunter College in New York City, along with David Raichlen of the University of Arizona and Brian M. Wood of Stanford University, the research team measured the daily energy expenditure (calories) of members of the Hadza, a population of hunter-gatherers who live in the open savannah of northern Tanzania. The Hadza, because of their life-style, are thought by scientists to closely approximate the way ancient hunter-gatherers in Africa may have lived tens of thousands of years ago in what many consider to be a possible ancestral homeland for modern humans. They found that, despite a way of life that involved trekking long distances to forage for wild plants and game, the Hadza actually did not burn more calories each day than modern-day adults in the U.S. and Europe. In their analysis, they tested for effects of body weight, body fat percentage, age, and gender. The study was significant in that it was the first to directly measure energy expenditure in hunter-gatherers; before, scientists had relied primarily upon estimates. \=/

“It is surprising because modern sedentary lifestyles characteristic of those living in Western countries are thought to be quite different from those of hunter-gatherers, and by extension our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors. This fact is raised by many as the cause of the current rise in global obesity. Moreover, it challenges long-held assumptions that our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors, always “on the go”, must have expended more energy than modern populations. It also suggests that metabolic rates are actually comparatively constant among diverse human populations. “These results highlight the complexity of energy expenditure,” says Pontzer . “It’s not simply a function of physical activity. Our metabolic rates may be more a reflection of our shared evolutionary past than our diverse modern lifestyles.” \=/

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated April 2024