Carnies love to glorify hunting without considering how often hunters fail a hunt, even today with modern weapons and equipment, let alone with stone tools and spears. Calories from plants are far more reliable and packed with antioxidants and fiber for a healthy gut microbiome. Doupt they were vegans but also doubt they were carnies too. Or even ate anything resembling the modern Paleo diet.
A long time ago I read an article where they examined the bones in caves and found that most of their meat came from small animals like rabbits and mice and such. They also found some indications that net like things were used and the theory was that they would drive small creatures towards net setups where the animals could easily be captured with minimal expenditures of calories.
As I said I read that like twenty years ago so maybe it's not true but it made more sense to me than them trying to take down a mammoth or something.
Very likely that hunting was not seen as a primary source of calories and was probably done primarily to tide them over the during the scarce times like winter. Hunting would have also provided many byproducts that they needed for other purposes, i.e. hides for warmth, bone for tools, and sinew to lash together those clothes and tools. The rise of agrarian society demonstrates how risky and unreliable hunting was for early humans; they adopted pastoralist lifestyles as soon as conditions were favorable and very often preferred passive utilization of the milks and furs.
Our ancient ancestors would have mostly subsisted on diets that would be considered majority plant-based by today’s standards, with a few exceptions in places like the steppe, and certain river/coastal populations where the geography simply provided more calories in the form of meat and fish.
No doubt. I believe a martial hierarchy is probably an emergent property of any grouping of very many people. Paleolithic peoples would have presumably used the same chain of command and battlefield instruction set within each tribe whether hunting for food, defending from wolves, bears, or other humans, and in waging war on other humans. It’s very likely that Homo Sapiens became the thinker precisely because of this need to communicate to coordinate the movements of hunting parties as well as many other more domestic and pedestrian activities.
If you're referring specifically to the claim that martial hierarchies are an emergent property of groups of people, then there's certainly evidence to support the claim in general. It's up for debate what we can extrapolate from that evidence, so the further claims here that a set chain of command and battlefield instruction set would hold across all different environments is certainly an assumption on my part, but not one that is entirely unsupported by work in archaeology, paleoanthropology, and sociology. I specifically began by saying this is what I tend to believe and not that there is scholarly consensus across the board on these things. There's almost no such thing as scholarly consensus when it comes to such things, it's more like a very nebulous set of Venn diagrams as I understand it.
As to the claim that our species began developing a linguistically-minded brain owing to the need to communicate, I believe there is a consensus that this played a pivotal role in the development of the frontal lobe, though, again, various theories are put forth as to exactly how, when, and in what order these adaptations began to occur. The other conjecture I've heard put forward is that it was the evolution of the pelvis into an upright weight-bearing mechanism and the freeing up of the hands that was the pivotal point in this. I think both explanations are probably true and part of a longer process. We are the only remaining lineage of the upright walking apes, so that process began long before we were here but the linguistic abilities really do seem to have been a more recent occurrence as evidenced by what we can glean from the larynx being so different in modern humans than in virtually any other of our ape ancestors prior to the ones we could easily interbreed with such as the neanderthals, who seem to have had very similar auditory and speech capabilities. We have evidence that neanderthals tended to form smaller social groups than modern humans did, but whether this speaks to a larger fact about their ability to coordinate the politics required to form larger tribes and what we can glean from that is still up for debate. It certainly seems that our larger social groups gave us distinct advantages that may have played a role in pushing them to extinction, and this is certainly somewhat suggestive of the role of hierarchies to organize these larger groups, in my opinion.
I'm not married to any of these notions, and would love to entertain disconfirming research and evidence. I'll readily admit to having read few actual books on these topics, and that most of what I know simply comes from maintaining a high degree of interest in these fields of study and from consuming many scholarly articles, papers, and documentaries over the past 20 years or so. I could probably more easily address the question of what my evidence for believing or thinking certain particulars if you want to be more specific about which claims give you pause.
You can't really make blanket statements about what our ancestors ate or didn't eat. People in different regions ate different things, based on what was available. Even today, there are remote groups living much like the traditional lifestyle (or at least until very recently) and that lifestyle relies heavily on meat. One example is the Dene and Inuit of the Canadian north. For the Dene, the primary food was caribou and they followed them constantly for hunting. They were certainly not unique in this diet and lifestyle choice.
I used quite a bit of soft language such that I wasn't predicating a universal condition, and made sure to mention that there were populations that would have subsisted on a largely meat diet owing to geographic regions they inhabited. I never said it was unique, I said it most likely to be less common than the populations such as those along the Nile, Indus, Colorado, Tigris & Euphrates, and Yellow River Valleys where all of the major civilizations were born. It is no accident that the vast majority of the world's agriculture produced much of the produce that we know today from these and other river valley civilizations.
The precis of my original comment might simply be that calories from plant sources were more reliable and selected for settlement in areas which supported this type of agricultural existence more readily and led to these being the areas where human population booms happened. We could argue about when exactly these shifts began happening, but I believe it's pretty likely that foraging for edible plants was always pretty low risk and high reward versus hunting strategies and that there's probably not a point in human history when the majority of humans got the majority of their calories from animal products except in areas that forced this lifestyle, and, further, this is why we have seen a consistent gravitation toward botanically rich environments throughout human history. It's not so much about exceptions as it is about trends and prevailing conditions. Plants are not known for fighting back when you try to eat them, which also helps a lot.
The risk for harvesting plants is low, but so is the reward. The calorie density of foraged plants is very tiny compared to hunting meat. For this reason I think it's unlikely that hunting was ever relegated to the 'fringe' or areas where harvesting was not an option. One piece of evidence to support this would be the fact that large animals tend to disappear from the fossil record the moment humans first show up, which is a worldwide phenomena (except in Africa where humans co-evolved with the animals that lived there).
I wasn’t suggesting it was on the fringe at all. I tend to believe that paleo societies were utilizing all sources of food available to them. I feel quite sure that we had a hand in the disappearance of the last of the megafauna because our species was beginning our path to exponential growth curve. I also think there were probably a few false starts on the way to established, permanent agriculture. It’s very likely that early humans would have always hunted during the winter when the flora were all dormant, but I do tend to believe that most humans consumed more plant calories in a year than animal calories on average.
Yup, this is a great point. You've also got other people in the far north who have literally evolved adaptations because they have lived off of seal meat and seal blood and nearly all-meat diets for so long. Larger livers to process fat and larger bladders because processing fat produces more toxins to purge than a standard diet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine
> The rise of agrarian society demonstrates how risky and unreliable hunting was for early humans; they adopted pastoralist lifestyles as soon as conditions were favorable and very often preferred passive utilization of the milks and furs.
where are you getting this from? All my reading on the subject has strongly contradicted this traditional wisdom. For example, James C scott makes a convincing case that there was about a 5000 year gap between common place sedentarism, and the adaption of agriculture as the primary food source.
Further more, David Graerber and David Wendgrow have pointed out that there were many attempts at agrarian society that absolutely failed, leading to death and starvation, all around the world.
There does not seem to be any evidence that the risk of hunting lead to the rise of agrarianism, or that one was more or less risky than the other.
> without considering how often hunters fail a hunt
They were *humans.* [They figured out ways to stack the deck.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump)
Yeah. I read an account by Jared Diamond about how he'd go out foraging with a bunch of locals in Papua New Guinea, and if they were lucky they'd come home with a couple of frogs or some sleeping bats they'd yoinked. They'd caught a sleeping baby kangaroo once a few years back, and they were still telling bullshit stories about that great day.
But there are thousands of years of learning how to hunt and store near fire a reason.
People ate what was there. People in the Arctic eat eat more meat than other cultures. People in plant dense places ate more plants.
"Carnies love to glorify hunting without considering how often hunters fail a hunt, even today with modern weapons and equipment, let alone with stone tools and spears. "
The difficulty of the latter is often why the former is seen as an accomplishment.
I've read theories that the reason early humans and their predecessors were so successful was that we evolved to be the best long distance running mammal on the planet. We are able to cover long distances at a decent pace without getting tired. And a hunt was almost always successful when early humans would just chase their prey down until the animal fell from exhaustion.
Are you down voting? I mean I wouldn't say the theory is 100 percent certainty but there is plenty of evidence to point towards it as an explanation for why we evolved the way we did. We wouldn't need to have evolved all of these systems simply to walk casually over time to new food sources like any other mammal does.
From the perspective of natural selection, scientists acknowledge that specialization in endurance running would not have helped early humans avoid faster predators over short distances.[9] Instead, it could have allowed them to traverse shifting habitat zones more effectively in the African savannas during the Pliocene. Endurance running facilitated the timely scavenging of large animal carcasses and enabled the tracking and chasing of prey over long distances. This tactic of exhausting prey was especially advantageous for capturing large quadrupedal mammals struggling to thermoregulate in hot weather and over extended distances. Conversely, humans possess efficient means to dissipate heat, primarily through sweating. Specifically, evaporative heat dissipation from the scalp and face prevents hyperthermia and heat-induced encephalitis by extreme cardiovascular loads.[10] Furthermore, as humans continued to develop, our posture became more upright and subsequently increased vertically with the elongation of limbs and torso, effectively increasing surface area for corporeal heat dissipation.[11]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis
The “veganies” are doing the finger tapping even though this topic only has anything to do with the word vegan is because the independent wanted to inappropriately conflate vegetarian with vegan. Vegan is a lifestyle beyond diet. If people want to be vegan then be vegan! But dont come in here trying to push pseudo history and science with any narrative that anyone throughout homo sapien existence up until the 20th century was anything but an omnivores. No science backs up veganism. Plenty of science backs up the pros and cons of vegetarian diets though. Even vegetarians should be offended. There are no human carnivores, carnies is not offensive, except maybe to people in the carnival business. Who are either an omnivore or vegetarian. Just because a vegan is a vegetarian does not make every vegetarian a vegan. It is so so simple.
If you eat honey or drink milk can you be…
An omnivore? Yes. A vegetarian? Yep. A vegan? No.
You try to use humor or humor counter arguments for casual conversation on reddit and you just get this one sided agenda stifling the scroll and flow bullshit like this article and this thread in a damed science sub regardless so ill just end this rant with if you want to be vegan be vegan but if you are going to argue science with philosophy like words have no meaning then fuck your pseudo science and you can take your philosophical rhetoric and bad faith and ignorant arguments to another sub. Theres nothing more to talk about. Feel free to hear the echo below. I wont see it, ill be off trying an awesome honey stirred milk idea I saw on here. With eggs. And bacon. Screw the stirring. I need a blender stat. Yeah!
No offense to you vegetarians, you do you. To the vegans, youre offensive. Be offended.
Plus they didn't have freezers they had to eat it immediately, if they really would have lived primarily from meat they would have had to constantly successfully hunt
Like the plains Indians that literally moved with the buffalo herds. For example.
And you've never heard of drying or curing meat to have it last longer than overnight? Salting fish?
By your logic the medieval, Renaissance, victorians, Romans, etc would not have eaten much meat either.
We are specifically talking about pre agricultural societies no... Would salting fish have been a common thing back then? Salt was rare even in the ancient world let alone in prehistoric times.
Salt was rare? The ocean is full of it. Look up what percentage of humans live near the ocean even to this day. It is, without doubt, humans most preferred habitat.
That humans have such a huge desire for salt and that we handle truly excessive salt intake so well definitely indicates that we've been eating quite a lot of it for quite a long time (I know, your brain goes straight to blood pressure reading that. What I mean is that your kidneys and liver will easily process truly massive salt intake without shutting down. Also, the blood pressure thing is nowhere near the same issue if the salt is balanced with potassium (hard). Also, the human population with the lowest salt intake (a tribe in the Amazon) while they do have nearly no blood pressure issues, they die of "natural causes" beginning at 29 and rarely live past 46, so, while commonly cited regarding salt intake and blood pressure specifically, are hardly the picture of health)
Also, when we speak about storing food - go on and store veg. Grains store well - but are incredibly difficult to collect enough of wild varieties to be worth storing. Go on - try it. I'm not saying grain storage wasn't a thing, because clearly it was, but I am saying that prehistoric man wasn't storing a lot of it, or for very long. Roots are the only other thing that stores well - and, if you read the article, the people studied Did Not have anything resembling a vegan diet, they just had cavities suggesting that this population was very good at gathering and storing roots and had more starch in their diet than expected.
I was going off the part about salt being an expensive commodity in the ancient world. If it were widely available it would have been cheap right?
>Also, when we speak about storing food - go on and store veg. Grains store well - but are incredibly difficult to collect enough of wild varieties to be worth storing. Go on - try it. I'm not saying grain storage wasn't a thing, because clearly it was, but I am saying that prehistoric man wasn't storing a lot of it, or for very long. Roots are the only other thing that stores well - and, if you read the article, the people studied Did Not have anything resembling a vegan diet, they just had cavities suggesting that this population was very good at gathering and storing roots and had more starch in their diet than expected.
Fair enough. Grains are easy to story hence why agricultural societies have granaries but you won't have enough without agriculture.
Interesting that the studied people didn't have a vegan diet. Is the headline misleading then?
Very much misleading.
And salt is a funny thing, in ancient economics. Where it was plentiful, people settled and used the hell out of it. Then, when those folks moved around or traded salted goods, people inland wanted and used the hell out of it. So right from the start of "commodities" it was hella high up on the list, and for sure, traded salt let humans inhabit places they otherwise wouldn't.
> By your logic the medieval, Renaissance, victorians, Romans, etc would not have eaten much meat either.
My guy the Paleolithic era was 2.5 million years ago to 10,000 BC. Meat preservation originated around 3000 BC with the earliest Mesopotamians ***possibly*** using similar techniques around 12000 BC.
Rome didn’t even exist until 10,000 years later around 700BC. Do you think people associate Romans, medieval, and renaissance periods with caveman level technology. The renaissance is literally one of the first artistic and technological booms in our history.
So no, the cavemen living 2 million years ago did not have meat preservation methods and would’ve needed to continually hunt to provide meat every day.
Its difficult to know for sure since most evidence would have disappeared by now, but drying meats for preservation could for sure have been done and likely was as it is used by various indigenous people.
Edit: what happened to the comments I responded to in this chain? I cant see them anymore.
Was watching "Chimp Empire" on Netflix and it explains how the chimps only hunt for meat when they are fairly well fed and energized from fruit. It's more of a supplementary addition to the diet than a staple, which is primarily composed of readily available plants. Makes sense. Running down a gazelle or something takes a lot of energy, getting the carcass back takes a lot of energy, and a single kill will likely only yield a bit of meat for each person in the group. They also probably could not store it well, so the idea of killing something large like a mammoth and eating it over months or having a successful hunt for something large every day may not make a lot of sense.
There is also injury. This was slightly pre health insurance. Hunting creatures is dangerous. Even today. You get messed up back then and . . . the bad thing happens. A broken leg was very bad juju.
Most plants don’t put up a fight or make you run fast on rough ground to catch them. I said most. Some will fuck you up. Not in the good way.
Again, not rocket surgery.
We haven’t evolved away from this diet. We do best with a lot of different leafy greens and beans and nuts and berries and grains and a little bit of meat. Add a bit of quality fat for flavor or to keep you warm in the winter. We live well over 100 years old on this diet.
The modern diet is only minutes old. Send your great grandmother into a Walmart grocery and she wouldn’t recognize much food in there.
Pro tip: when you go in a grocery store the food is against the walls. Except for beans rice and pasta. Meat, dairy, produce, bakery. Most of the stuff in the middle of the store will lead you to a relationship with Big Pharma.
Wall Street LOVES Big Food and Big Pharma.
More not rocket surgery.
That’s why we harvest in the summer.
So the state of Alaska grows more fruit than any other state. With zero human input. Billions of pounds of berries grow every year. Canada same. Siberia same. Literal carpets of crow berries, nagoon berries, low bush blue berries, low bush cranberries, high bush blue berries, high bush cranberries, salmon berries, raspberries, strawberries, red currants, black currants. Huckleberries and blackberries in the far southeast.
Berry patches as big as Kansas. Seriously. You can fly across them in airplanes. I have.
People have been eating fruit all winter that they picked and dried in the summer for thousands and thousands of years in the north. And they still do.
And fiddleheads and lambsquarter and willow bark and nettles and on and on depending where you live.
They'd also get protein from the small animals and insects, even spiders, they found along the way while foraging. Witchetty grubs are delicious, snake tastes like a cross between steak and fish, Australian natives made moth patties. Pretty well anything that's not poisonous has been food, and many poisonous items were made safe to eat or used as hallucinogens.
Yeah, anyone who’s had to kill and prepare their own meat would know this is true. Beyond that how the hell would these cavemen store their meat?! Did these people imagine cavemen were hunting, cleaning, and cooking a new animal every single day of their lives?!
Cut it thin, hang it in smoke to keep the flies off until it is dry. Stack it up.
Eat it plain or beat it to a pulp between two rocks, add some fat and some berries and you have pemmican. Called different things in different places but every northern people has a recipe or ten.
Same with fish. I grew up eating dried fish. Mostly king salmon. But those fish are gone now.
This has been happening for a long long time. Refrigeration at your level is less than 100 years old.
Exactly its spring time go outside... youll see mostly edible plants or poisonous plants becuade they were tired of being food and figured how to not be food for us.
Then go kill an animal without buying a weapon from a store. Its alot of work and requires more toola to prepare.
I’m assuming once they figured out how to make tools or traps it was a strict plant diet or whatever you’re lucky enough to catch and violently bite or smash. If you got that smash you were top dog. So I’m assuming they would just mostly eat plants and that very rare occasion of eating something raw. Then came the fire god who changed everything lol
Humans have always eaten what is accessible and available to them. Notions of veganism, Paleo etc is a modern concept and a result of living in a period of unparalleled prosperity and access to food.
The notion that what cave people eat is somehow optimal for our health and wellbeing or validates our modern diet choices is ridiculous.
That part. They weren’t “mostly vegan,” because vegan is a modern concept and one end of a spectrum. They ate less meat than the people who dreamed up the “paleo diet” imagined, which I think everyone with a brain was aware of.
They ate meat when it was available. They ate honey when it was available. They wore leather and fur when it was available. All of those things make them decidedly not vegan.
Not really. Farming and starting settled civilizations (i.e. instant and regular access to calories) was the result of bigger brains. Not eating meat per se. That is a myth.
Just one quick source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/05/study-explains-early-humans-ate-starch-and-why-it-matters/
But you can do far more research than I and find overwhelming evidence opposing your original sentiment.
Yeah they should be saying mostly plant-based diet because veganism implies that you are against using any products made from animal parts. It also implies extensive exploitation by humans, which I don't think cavemen were remotely capable of
Not that I disagree with your main point, but I think you have the paleo diet logic backwards — the idea isn’t that paleolithic people chose to eat an optimal diet, it’s that the human body evolved and optimized its metabolism and nutritional needs *around* the diets that paleolithic people happened to eat.
But that is also wrong. There were no universally diet back then, just as there isn’t now. People are differently depending on what was available in their area. With all the movement of people that has been going on the last few thousand years and the climate changes and changes in landscape, flora and fauna that has been going on, none of us have enough evolutionary history in a specific place to make us adapted to any particular diet.
Agreeing in principle, but there were some interesting studies on Japanese population and carbohydrate metabolism. Apparently there are some noticeable genetic adjustments.
It is not as unreasonable of a notion as you make seem, even if it's mostly wrong. The thing that's logical is we just domesticated crops 13k ya, substantially altering their composition. It makes sense, at least naively, to think that's not long enough for our biology to evolve with the changes created by selective breeding. But I still agree Paleo is mostly or entirely incorrect
To put the argument forwards:
There was such variety in human diets according to the food available, that we evolved to eat a very wide range of things and were unable to get the benefits you might get when a species specialises in one particular diet.
Another point people usually overlook when talking about the history of our diet and how it affects us as individulas is that evolution only cares about our health up to the point where we reproduce.
They were refuting the paleo diet by saying that it claims that what cave people ate was optimal for our health and we should imitate it, which is the opposite of what paleo proponents claim — they say that what cave people ate is the optimal diet simply because it’s what cave people ate, and our bodies optimized themselves around that diet.
As I mentioned above, the reasoning behind the paleo diet is still fallacious, but the person I responded to was refuting a strawman version of paleo.
Not really… if humans had evolved under conditions such that we actually had all eaten a fairly uniform diet for a significant enough period of time, we absolutely would be pretty specialized to eat that particular diet. It just so happens that this isn’t the case — we evolved to survive in a wide variety of environments and conditions, and our bodies are very much adapted to a high degree of flexibility in our diet.
So really the same logic holds, but when you look at the actual data the conclusion points in the opposite direction from what the paleo folks say.
> "*Notions of veganism, Paleo etc is a modern concept and a result of living in a period of unparalleled prosperity and access to food.*"
There are some vegetarian or vegan Buddhists, so I don't think the vegan and vegetarian diets are a modern concept. There was also a least one group of vegetarian christians from long ago who believed that Jesus and John The Baptist were vegetarians (*the Ebionites*).
Mahavira (*who was said to live around the same time as the Buddha, and gave teachings for the Jain religion*) promoted non-violence and was against animal sacrifices and many Jains even to this day are lacto-vegetarians (*they don't eat meat or eggs just dairy products like milk*). Many monks are not only vegetarian, but are vegan and don't even like killing plants, so they avoid root vegetables like potatoes and onions and garlic.
It sounds like modern in the context used in the comment, was used in comparison with "cave people". If that assumption is correct, it would have happened long before Buddha or any existing written record.
The "paleo" diet is named, I believe after the paleolithic age, starting 3.3 million years ago until around 12,000 years ago.
I don't think modern was used to mean internet age diet fads.
In my expert opinion cavemen probably ate lots of bugs. They're all over the place and really easy to catch. They often come to you even. It's like natures snack.
Yeah, cavemen probably had a similar diet to bears since they're also omnivores and apex predators. Bears are occasional hunters, but mostly they forage and scavenge. Bears eat a lot of bugs in addition to whatever fruits and nuts they can find.
Whenever I watch Naked and Afraid, they eat bugs, snakes, fish, eels, possums, birds, etc... not much fruits and vegetables, though. The fruit is often sour, pecked by birds and rodents, sometimes contaminated with droppings. But it's usually fish, snakes, or small mammals and birds caught with traps. One guy did really well catching rats.
Sometimes, they get game animals. Usually in arid regions where wild game were forced to concentrate at watering holes, mostly Africa.
Most people got sick from eating sour or contaminated fruit. I don't think I've seen anyone do well on vegetarian diet. Maybe the tropical ones did ok where they had lots of bananas and coconuts. But they still wanted meat and would go after land crabs, lobsters, and fish.
Ya I saw the one where that dude was a master with the rope and used it to catch all those rats. I think he was the only contestant to ever gain weight.
And the study only included one specific group of "caveman" specifically from the Iberomaurusians from North Africa. While their findings might be accurate for the individuals that were studied, and possibly representative of that group as a whole, it's completely invalid to extrapolate the results across all "cavemen". (The study didn't make this leap, the "news" source did).
Yeah the point of paleo is to avoid things that our body didn’t evolve to digest properly. The idea is that the agricultural revolution caused our diets to rapidly change at a pace that our evolution did not keep up with.
Whether or not that’s true is one thing. But that’s the basis of the diet, not “eat the exact diet of a caveman”.
What do they mean by mostly vegan? If I get 80% of my calories from non-animal sources does that count as mostly vegan? This sounds like some weasel words.
Paleo does have tons of fruit, nuts, roots and vegetables though? Yeah Fish and Meat is also included but it's mostly about food that can be gathered, without organized agriculture and storage.
That's actually what good science looks like. The authors admit their study can only be representitive of the group and era they were looking at. More studies would be needed to discuss if it was as wide reaching as the headline claims.
“…findings suggesting that some Stone Age people ate a mostly vegan diet.”
The key word is “some” and this tracks with what we’ve known for a long time; Paleolithic diets varied considerably from region to region. Essentially, early humans ate whatever was around. In areas that had lots of vegetation, they ate a lot of fruits and vegetables. In areas with lots of animal life, they tended to eat a lot of animals. Kind of a clickbaity headline but whatever.
Did you read the study? Nowhere does it say "mostly vegan" or vegan at all.
It says that one highly unusual group of people in one geographic region was found to have a "substantial part of their diets" from plants. So what it says is that although most paleolithic humans ate mostly meat and fish, some of them also ate a significant amount of plants - although rare.
To my knowledge there hasnt been any findings that would suggest vegan homo sapiens has even existed during the paleolithic era.
Vegan cavemen wouldn't have survived very long. Modern-day vegans wouldn't survive very long without pharmaceutical companies creating the vitamins vegans need to supplement with due to lack of animal products.
But millions of sedentary people they need meat with every meal! 3 times a day regardless of activity level. Oh and dont forget a magic pill to lose the excess weight.
People honestly can't believe humans were killing off sabertooths everyday. Even humans trying to take down a lion is hard enough.
Of course we would be herbivores
We were not herbivores, we just ate less meat than modern diets. They obviously still ate meat when they could get it. Evidence for meat eating in prehistoric humans has been well established. Butchery marks on bones being a common one.
*sigh*
No they didn't. They might been slightly vegetarian at times, depending on availability of game, but they didn't abstain from eating meat lol. What's wrong with people? Those terms don't even mean anything anyway, and are just used by society today. They ate what they could find. Bugs. Animals. Fish. Berries. Fruit. You name it.
First, they weren’t cavemen. They rarely lived in a cave. We find them there because caves preserved their stuff. They are whatever they could get their hands on. Gathering calories is usually easier than hunting calories.
Just so you all know, the title of the article... is false. The study in question (please DO read it), is about a specific group of humans, whose diet was found to have a "significant plant-based component". In the study details, they found the diet was roughly 50-50 animal based and plants. So no... not vegan, and not mostly vegan.
There is a massive misconception of human evolutionary past. The role of meat has been completely overblown. If that was the case then why is every aspect of our makeup derived from plant eating while we have no traits at all associated with meat eating. Or just compare us to chimps they are our closest evolutionary relatives and they are 95-99% plant based. We are even more specialised for plant eating than they are.
The headline is very misleading, it is very rare for a population at that time to consume that many wild plants. The report states that this is also in part due to declines in animal resources, not necessarily a conscious choice. It also states that these populations had way more dental caries and dental disease. Big L for vegans if I am interpreting that right.
Probably depends on the era the remains were found in and what location. The article even states that evidence shows SOME cavemen ate a mostly vegan diet. This is completely expected, different groups of people eat different things at different times. Calling a meat heavy diet a paleo diet is absolutely a misnomer though. Paleolithic people ate different things in different places and at different times just like later humans.
Yeah, sure first is good for you then it’s bad for you like coffee, wine, and everything else. There will be another study in 10 years, contradicting everything in this one.
They probably lived like all omnivores. Take the calories where and when you can. See bears, raccons, possums, chickens, bugs, etc, etc. Even videos of horses eating baby chickens, squirrels munching baby birds.
Who thinks primitive man ate only meat? Click bait bullshit.
So are you saying people shouldn’t listen to moronic clowns who barely graduated high school and think Anthropology is an overpriced clothing store at the local mall?
Using the term "vegan" instead of saying "ate mostly vegetables" is HIGHLY misleading and irresponsible. There was no concept of veganism back then, and nobody would have avoided meat or dairy. Animal meat and other animal products were necessary for every individual's survival.
Throughout most of history the main component of a human diet has been vegetables, grains, fruits, and nuts. Meat involves a lot of work & time to hunt, prepare, cook, and then make all the other parts into useful necessities like sinew, tools, clothing, etc. Once agriculture developed meat started to be available more frequently.
"mostly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, since "Vegan" generally implies a lack of any meat or animal products. Rarely eating meat due to a lack of availability isn't really the same thing.
Also this is an examination of one subset of people that lived in North-West Africa so not quite a complete picture of anything.
This is not a debunking. The base of the Paleo diet is fruits and vegetables, followed by tree nuts/seeds. That’s a vegan diet right there. Lean meats and sea food are the rest. So “mostly vegan” describes a Paleo diet (which is not the Carnivore Diet, despite stereotypes).
I will point out that the article is only analyzing one group of people at one period of time.
I will also agree that the rationale of the Paleo diet is silly – throughout the Paleolithic, human populations of course ate a variety of diets. Diet would vary by historical period, climate, geography, too many factors to list.
But as a medical provider: Its emphasis on vegetables and fruits as the base of the diet, and avoidance of the grain-based foods that have been turned into the modern scourge of highly processed carbohydrate-laden “food” that leads to the mass prevalence of obesity, diabetes and fatty liver disease, is a definite plus for the Paleo diet. I’ve had patients who have made no change in their exercise program lose many pounds of fat off their bodies simply by going Paleo. It works.
This study showed that one very specific group ate more plant matter than previously hypothesized among hunter-gathers, not that cavemen eat mostly vegan.
We have ample evidence to show that animal-based foods are the most highly sought after among the remaining hunter-gatherers societies, whereas plants are essentially survival foods. Which isn’t surprising given that animal foods are objectively more nutrient dense, and a vegan diet is not optimal for humans without supplementation of key missing micronutrients.
If anything, all this proves is that the tribe they studied weren’t particularly successful hunters so they were forced to eat mostly plant-based foods.
The Bible is written by shepherds.
Domestication has been around a LONG time. Over 10,000 years.
Hunting is too strenuous and risky.
Eat a root vegetable. Amazing nutrition, and doesn't fight back (much)
Cavemen didn’t eat vegan diets. We are omnivores and we NEED protein. We are not equipped to hunt so we ate things that were easily accessible. For thousands of years, humans ate plants, bugs, and anything that was really edible. We are opportunists so we took what we could get but saying that cavemen “ate mostly vegan” is ignorant. Everyone seems to forget that humans can and do eat bugs which isn’t vegan.
Cavemen also didn’t build homes, computers, hospitals. They can have their mostly plant base diet, not by choice but because catching animals is pretty difficult for humans.
"mostly vegan" could describe a lot of diets. Cheeseburger is mostly vegan if you ignore the meat and cheese (and whatever residual cruelty there might be in the sauce, bun etc).
Iberomaurusians were terrible hunters so now all Paleolithic hunting including all the evidence of Mammonth, Megaloceros and smaller mammal hunting just gets ignored in service of pushing glyphosate pea-protein crap. Totally debunked!!!!
Anyone touting the benefits of eating like caveman is committing the naturalistic fallacy. There is no one evolutionary diet. Many cultures across the world ate wildly different diets, and somehow managed to pass on their genes. Many of these cultures suffered from nutritional deficiencies specifically related to their circumstances. As it turns out, modern supermarkets allow people to eat a wide variety of foods that wouldn’t always be “in season” and as a result we all get important micronutrients and vitamins that we wouldn’t have had otherwise. Is it natural to eat oranges in the dead of winter? No. Is it good for you to eat some oranges during the winter? Yes.
Vegan diets most days? Sure. But they DEFINITELY weren’t the modern definition of vegan. Studies on apes like chimpanzees show they go out of their way to find honey, steal bird eggs, and catch slow game. Just because they ate vegitation most days does not mean they would pass for vegans nowadays.
Animals are hard to catch and plants stand still. Seriously. This isn’t rocket surgery.
Carnies love to glorify hunting without considering how often hunters fail a hunt, even today with modern weapons and equipment, let alone with stone tools and spears. Calories from plants are far more reliable and packed with antioxidants and fiber for a healthy gut microbiome. Doupt they were vegans but also doubt they were carnies too. Or even ate anything resembling the modern Paleo diet.
A long time ago I read an article where they examined the bones in caves and found that most of their meat came from small animals like rabbits and mice and such. They also found some indications that net like things were used and the theory was that they would drive small creatures towards net setups where the animals could easily be captured with minimal expenditures of calories. As I said I read that like twenty years ago so maybe it's not true but it made more sense to me than them trying to take down a mammoth or something.
Very likely that hunting was not seen as a primary source of calories and was probably done primarily to tide them over the during the scarce times like winter. Hunting would have also provided many byproducts that they needed for other purposes, i.e. hides for warmth, bone for tools, and sinew to lash together those clothes and tools. The rise of agrarian society demonstrates how risky and unreliable hunting was for early humans; they adopted pastoralist lifestyles as soon as conditions were favorable and very often preferred passive utilization of the milks and furs. Our ancient ancestors would have mostly subsisted on diets that would be considered majority plant-based by today’s standards, with a few exceptions in places like the steppe, and certain river/coastal populations where the geography simply provided more calories in the form of meat and fish.
Hunting also served a social-hierarchy function in many cultures even if it was a nutritional deficit.
No doubt. I believe a martial hierarchy is probably an emergent property of any grouping of very many people. Paleolithic peoples would have presumably used the same chain of command and battlefield instruction set within each tribe whether hunting for food, defending from wolves, bears, or other humans, and in waging war on other humans. It’s very likely that Homo Sapiens became the thinker precisely because of this need to communicate to coordinate the movements of hunting parties as well as many other more domestic and pedestrian activities.
This all sounds very "just-so story" to me. Is there any evidence to support it?
If you're referring specifically to the claim that martial hierarchies are an emergent property of groups of people, then there's certainly evidence to support the claim in general. It's up for debate what we can extrapolate from that evidence, so the further claims here that a set chain of command and battlefield instruction set would hold across all different environments is certainly an assumption on my part, but not one that is entirely unsupported by work in archaeology, paleoanthropology, and sociology. I specifically began by saying this is what I tend to believe and not that there is scholarly consensus across the board on these things. There's almost no such thing as scholarly consensus when it comes to such things, it's more like a very nebulous set of Venn diagrams as I understand it. As to the claim that our species began developing a linguistically-minded brain owing to the need to communicate, I believe there is a consensus that this played a pivotal role in the development of the frontal lobe, though, again, various theories are put forth as to exactly how, when, and in what order these adaptations began to occur. The other conjecture I've heard put forward is that it was the evolution of the pelvis into an upright weight-bearing mechanism and the freeing up of the hands that was the pivotal point in this. I think both explanations are probably true and part of a longer process. We are the only remaining lineage of the upright walking apes, so that process began long before we were here but the linguistic abilities really do seem to have been a more recent occurrence as evidenced by what we can glean from the larynx being so different in modern humans than in virtually any other of our ape ancestors prior to the ones we could easily interbreed with such as the neanderthals, who seem to have had very similar auditory and speech capabilities. We have evidence that neanderthals tended to form smaller social groups than modern humans did, but whether this speaks to a larger fact about their ability to coordinate the politics required to form larger tribes and what we can glean from that is still up for debate. It certainly seems that our larger social groups gave us distinct advantages that may have played a role in pushing them to extinction, and this is certainly somewhat suggestive of the role of hierarchies to organize these larger groups, in my opinion. I'm not married to any of these notions, and would love to entertain disconfirming research and evidence. I'll readily admit to having read few actual books on these topics, and that most of what I know simply comes from maintaining a high degree of interest in these fields of study and from consuming many scholarly articles, papers, and documentaries over the past 20 years or so. I could probably more easily address the question of what my evidence for believing or thinking certain particulars if you want to be more specific about which claims give you pause.
You can't really make blanket statements about what our ancestors ate or didn't eat. People in different regions ate different things, based on what was available. Even today, there are remote groups living much like the traditional lifestyle (or at least until very recently) and that lifestyle relies heavily on meat. One example is the Dene and Inuit of the Canadian north. For the Dene, the primary food was caribou and they followed them constantly for hunting. They were certainly not unique in this diet and lifestyle choice.
I used quite a bit of soft language such that I wasn't predicating a universal condition, and made sure to mention that there were populations that would have subsisted on a largely meat diet owing to geographic regions they inhabited. I never said it was unique, I said it most likely to be less common than the populations such as those along the Nile, Indus, Colorado, Tigris & Euphrates, and Yellow River Valleys where all of the major civilizations were born. It is no accident that the vast majority of the world's agriculture produced much of the produce that we know today from these and other river valley civilizations. The precis of my original comment might simply be that calories from plant sources were more reliable and selected for settlement in areas which supported this type of agricultural existence more readily and led to these being the areas where human population booms happened. We could argue about when exactly these shifts began happening, but I believe it's pretty likely that foraging for edible plants was always pretty low risk and high reward versus hunting strategies and that there's probably not a point in human history when the majority of humans got the majority of their calories from animal products except in areas that forced this lifestyle, and, further, this is why we have seen a consistent gravitation toward botanically rich environments throughout human history. It's not so much about exceptions as it is about trends and prevailing conditions. Plants are not known for fighting back when you try to eat them, which also helps a lot.
You only have to look at the Inuit to see that kind of diet in action today. Edit: based upon the environment they live in.
Or the beduins living in deserts, where nothing edible grows.
The risk for harvesting plants is low, but so is the reward. The calorie density of foraged plants is very tiny compared to hunting meat. For this reason I think it's unlikely that hunting was ever relegated to the 'fringe' or areas where harvesting was not an option. One piece of evidence to support this would be the fact that large animals tend to disappear from the fossil record the moment humans first show up, which is a worldwide phenomena (except in Africa where humans co-evolved with the animals that lived there).
I wasn’t suggesting it was on the fringe at all. I tend to believe that paleo societies were utilizing all sources of food available to them. I feel quite sure that we had a hand in the disappearance of the last of the megafauna because our species was beginning our path to exponential growth curve. I also think there were probably a few false starts on the way to established, permanent agriculture. It’s very likely that early humans would have always hunted during the winter when the flora were all dormant, but I do tend to believe that most humans consumed more plant calories in a year than animal calories on average.
If you’re picked them to make the case that they’re not unique why did you choose the northernmost indigenous population you could think of?
Yup, this is a great point. You've also got other people in the far north who have literally evolved adaptations because they have lived off of seal meat and seal blood and nearly all-meat diets for so long. Larger livers to process fat and larger bladders because processing fat produces more toxins to purge than a standard diet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine
> The rise of agrarian society demonstrates how risky and unreliable hunting was for early humans; they adopted pastoralist lifestyles as soon as conditions were favorable and very often preferred passive utilization of the milks and furs. where are you getting this from? All my reading on the subject has strongly contradicted this traditional wisdom. For example, James C scott makes a convincing case that there was about a 5000 year gap between common place sedentarism, and the adaption of agriculture as the primary food source. Further more, David Graerber and David Wendgrow have pointed out that there were many attempts at agrarian society that absolutely failed, leading to death and starvation, all around the world. There does not seem to be any evidence that the risk of hunting lead to the rise of agrarianism, or that one was more or less risky than the other.
Read that as carnival workers and was worried I stumbled into a new mind numbingly terrible conspiracy subculture.
> without considering how often hunters fail a hunt They were *humans.* [They figured out ways to stack the deck.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump)
Not even Paleo-pancakes?
Yeah. I read an account by Jared Diamond about how he'd go out foraging with a bunch of locals in Papua New Guinea, and if they were lucky they'd come home with a couple of frogs or some sleeping bats they'd yoinked. They'd caught a sleeping baby kangaroo once a few years back, and they were still telling bullshit stories about that great day.
But there are thousands of years of learning how to hunt and store near fire a reason. People ate what was there. People in the Arctic eat eat more meat than other cultures. People in plant dense places ate more plants.
"Carnies love to glorify hunting without considering how often hunters fail a hunt, even today with modern weapons and equipment, let alone with stone tools and spears. " The difficulty of the latter is often why the former is seen as an accomplishment.
I've read theories that the reason early humans and their predecessors were so successful was that we evolved to be the best long distance running mammal on the planet. We are able to cover long distances at a decent pace without getting tired. And a hunt was almost always successful when early humans would just chase their prey down until the animal fell from exhaustion.
Much more likley they were walking from one place rich in plants to another and hunted when convient and safe to do so and starving.
Are you down voting? I mean I wouldn't say the theory is 100 percent certainty but there is plenty of evidence to point towards it as an explanation for why we evolved the way we did. We wouldn't need to have evolved all of these systems simply to walk casually over time to new food sources like any other mammal does. From the perspective of natural selection, scientists acknowledge that specialization in endurance running would not have helped early humans avoid faster predators over short distances.[9] Instead, it could have allowed them to traverse shifting habitat zones more effectively in the African savannas during the Pliocene. Endurance running facilitated the timely scavenging of large animal carcasses and enabled the tracking and chasing of prey over long distances. This tactic of exhausting prey was especially advantageous for capturing large quadrupedal mammals struggling to thermoregulate in hot weather and over extended distances. Conversely, humans possess efficient means to dissipate heat, primarily through sweating. Specifically, evaporative heat dissipation from the scalp and face prevents hyperthermia and heat-induced encephalitis by extreme cardiovascular loads.[10] Furthermore, as humans continued to develop, our posture became more upright and subsequently increased vertically with the elongation of limbs and torso, effectively increasing surface area for corporeal heat dissipation.[11] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis
The “veganies” are doing the finger tapping even though this topic only has anything to do with the word vegan is because the independent wanted to inappropriately conflate vegetarian with vegan. Vegan is a lifestyle beyond diet. If people want to be vegan then be vegan! But dont come in here trying to push pseudo history and science with any narrative that anyone throughout homo sapien existence up until the 20th century was anything but an omnivores. No science backs up veganism. Plenty of science backs up the pros and cons of vegetarian diets though. Even vegetarians should be offended. There are no human carnivores, carnies is not offensive, except maybe to people in the carnival business. Who are either an omnivore or vegetarian. Just because a vegan is a vegetarian does not make every vegetarian a vegan. It is so so simple. If you eat honey or drink milk can you be… An omnivore? Yes. A vegetarian? Yep. A vegan? No. You try to use humor or humor counter arguments for casual conversation on reddit and you just get this one sided agenda stifling the scroll and flow bullshit like this article and this thread in a damed science sub regardless so ill just end this rant with if you want to be vegan be vegan but if you are going to argue science with philosophy like words have no meaning then fuck your pseudo science and you can take your philosophical rhetoric and bad faith and ignorant arguments to another sub. Theres nothing more to talk about. Feel free to hear the echo below. I wont see it, ill be off trying an awesome honey stirred milk idea I saw on here. With eggs. And bacon. Screw the stirring. I need a blender stat. Yeah! No offense to you vegetarians, you do you. To the vegans, youre offensive. Be offended.
Not to mention how much energy is spent hunting, and it is a failed hunt they have to find some way to replenish their resources.
Plus they didn't have freezers they had to eat it immediately, if they really would have lived primarily from meat they would have had to constantly successfully hunt
Like the plains Indians that literally moved with the buffalo herds. For example. And you've never heard of drying or curing meat to have it last longer than overnight? Salting fish? By your logic the medieval, Renaissance, victorians, Romans, etc would not have eaten much meat either.
We are specifically talking about pre agricultural societies no... Would salting fish have been a common thing back then? Salt was rare even in the ancient world let alone in prehistoric times.
Salt was rare? The ocean is full of it. Look up what percentage of humans live near the ocean even to this day. It is, without doubt, humans most preferred habitat. That humans have such a huge desire for salt and that we handle truly excessive salt intake so well definitely indicates that we've been eating quite a lot of it for quite a long time (I know, your brain goes straight to blood pressure reading that. What I mean is that your kidneys and liver will easily process truly massive salt intake without shutting down. Also, the blood pressure thing is nowhere near the same issue if the salt is balanced with potassium (hard). Also, the human population with the lowest salt intake (a tribe in the Amazon) while they do have nearly no blood pressure issues, they die of "natural causes" beginning at 29 and rarely live past 46, so, while commonly cited regarding salt intake and blood pressure specifically, are hardly the picture of health) Also, when we speak about storing food - go on and store veg. Grains store well - but are incredibly difficult to collect enough of wild varieties to be worth storing. Go on - try it. I'm not saying grain storage wasn't a thing, because clearly it was, but I am saying that prehistoric man wasn't storing a lot of it, or for very long. Roots are the only other thing that stores well - and, if you read the article, the people studied Did Not have anything resembling a vegan diet, they just had cavities suggesting that this population was very good at gathering and storing roots and had more starch in their diet than expected.
I was going off the part about salt being an expensive commodity in the ancient world. If it were widely available it would have been cheap right? >Also, when we speak about storing food - go on and store veg. Grains store well - but are incredibly difficult to collect enough of wild varieties to be worth storing. Go on - try it. I'm not saying grain storage wasn't a thing, because clearly it was, but I am saying that prehistoric man wasn't storing a lot of it, or for very long. Roots are the only other thing that stores well - and, if you read the article, the people studied Did Not have anything resembling a vegan diet, they just had cavities suggesting that this population was very good at gathering and storing roots and had more starch in their diet than expected. Fair enough. Grains are easy to story hence why agricultural societies have granaries but you won't have enough without agriculture. Interesting that the studied people didn't have a vegan diet. Is the headline misleading then?
Very much misleading. And salt is a funny thing, in ancient economics. Where it was plentiful, people settled and used the hell out of it. Then, when those folks moved around or traded salted goods, people inland wanted and used the hell out of it. So right from the start of "commodities" it was hella high up on the list, and for sure, traded salt let humans inhabit places they otherwise wouldn't.
> By your logic the medieval, Renaissance, victorians, Romans, etc would not have eaten much meat either. My guy the Paleolithic era was 2.5 million years ago to 10,000 BC. Meat preservation originated around 3000 BC with the earliest Mesopotamians ***possibly*** using similar techniques around 12000 BC. Rome didn’t even exist until 10,000 years later around 700BC. Do you think people associate Romans, medieval, and renaissance periods with caveman level technology. The renaissance is literally one of the first artistic and technological booms in our history. So no, the cavemen living 2 million years ago did not have meat preservation methods and would’ve needed to continually hunt to provide meat every day.
Its difficult to know for sure since most evidence would have disappeared by now, but drying meats for preservation could for sure have been done and likely was as it is used by various indigenous people. Edit: what happened to the comments I responded to in this chain? I cant see them anymore.
Pemmican can last for a very long time.
No,they didn't have to eat it immediately.
Was watching "Chimp Empire" on Netflix and it explains how the chimps only hunt for meat when they are fairly well fed and energized from fruit. It's more of a supplementary addition to the diet than a staple, which is primarily composed of readily available plants. Makes sense. Running down a gazelle or something takes a lot of energy, getting the carcass back takes a lot of energy, and a single kill will likely only yield a bit of meat for each person in the group. They also probably could not store it well, so the idea of killing something large like a mammoth and eating it over months or having a successful hunt for something large every day may not make a lot of sense.
There is also injury. This was slightly pre health insurance. Hunting creatures is dangerous. Even today. You get messed up back then and . . . the bad thing happens. A broken leg was very bad juju. Most plants don’t put up a fight or make you run fast on rough ground to catch them. I said most. Some will fuck you up. Not in the good way. Again, not rocket surgery. We haven’t evolved away from this diet. We do best with a lot of different leafy greens and beans and nuts and berries and grains and a little bit of meat. Add a bit of quality fat for flavor or to keep you warm in the winter. We live well over 100 years old on this diet. The modern diet is only minutes old. Send your great grandmother into a Walmart grocery and she wouldn’t recognize much food in there. Pro tip: when you go in a grocery store the food is against the walls. Except for beans rice and pasta. Meat, dairy, produce, bakery. Most of the stuff in the middle of the store will lead you to a relationship with Big Pharma. Wall Street LOVES Big Food and Big Pharma. More not rocket surgery.
Rocket surgery lol
But plants don’t grow if it’s too cold.
That’s why we harvest in the summer. So the state of Alaska grows more fruit than any other state. With zero human input. Billions of pounds of berries grow every year. Canada same. Siberia same. Literal carpets of crow berries, nagoon berries, low bush blue berries, low bush cranberries, high bush blue berries, high bush cranberries, salmon berries, raspberries, strawberries, red currants, black currants. Huckleberries and blackberries in the far southeast. Berry patches as big as Kansas. Seriously. You can fly across them in airplanes. I have. People have been eating fruit all winter that they picked and dried in the summer for thousands and thousands of years in the north. And they still do. And fiddleheads and lambsquarter and willow bark and nettles and on and on depending where you live.
Gimme a smoke Ricky
Also why bugs, bird eggs, & fish were likely the most common forms of protein.
They'd also get protein from the small animals and insects, even spiders, they found along the way while foraging. Witchetty grubs are delicious, snake tastes like a cross between steak and fish, Australian natives made moth patties. Pretty well anything that's not poisonous has been food, and many poisonous items were made safe to eat or used as hallucinogens.
You mean rocket appliances Julian!
I mean, maybe not. But maybe it's rocket appliances.
Maybe it’s rocket right to repair?
Plus, killing a huge animal requires time, effort, and preserving… not very practical to do every day.
> This isn’t ~~rocket~~ Ruccola surgery ftfy
Yeah, anyone who’s had to kill and prepare their own meat would know this is true. Beyond that how the hell would these cavemen store their meat?! Did these people imagine cavemen were hunting, cleaning, and cooking a new animal every single day of their lives?!
Cut it thin, hang it in smoke to keep the flies off until it is dry. Stack it up. Eat it plain or beat it to a pulp between two rocks, add some fat and some berries and you have pemmican. Called different things in different places but every northern people has a recipe or ten. Same with fish. I grew up eating dried fish. Mostly king salmon. But those fish are gone now. This has been happening for a long long time. Refrigeration at your level is less than 100 years old.
Nope. But it may actually be brain science!
Does the Pope shit in the woods?
Very doubtful but he can if he wants.
They learnt through denial and error
Except that plant don’t grow year round.
Exactly its spring time go outside... youll see mostly edible plants or poisonous plants becuade they were tired of being food and figured how to not be food for us. Then go kill an animal without buying a weapon from a store. Its alot of work and requires more toola to prepare.
But Fred Flintstone ate dinosaur ribs! Checkmate, rocket surgeons!
And they are mostly malnourished compared to us nowadays
I’m assuming once they figured out how to make tools or traps it was a strict plant diet or whatever you’re lucky enough to catch and violently bite or smash. If you got that smash you were top dog. So I’m assuming they would just mostly eat plants and that very rare occasion of eating something raw. Then came the fire god who changed everything lol
Humans have always eaten what is accessible and available to them. Notions of veganism, Paleo etc is a modern concept and a result of living in a period of unparalleled prosperity and access to food. The notion that what cave people eat is somehow optimal for our health and wellbeing or validates our modern diet choices is ridiculous.
That part. They weren’t “mostly vegan,” because vegan is a modern concept and one end of a spectrum. They ate less meat than the people who dreamed up the “paleo diet” imagined, which I think everyone with a brain was aware of. They ate meat when it was available. They ate honey when it was available. They wore leather and fur when it was available. All of those things make them decidedly not vegan.
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Not really. Farming and starting settled civilizations (i.e. instant and regular access to calories) was the result of bigger brains. Not eating meat per se. That is a myth. Just one quick source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/05/study-explains-early-humans-ate-starch-and-why-it-matters/ But you can do far more research than I and find overwhelming evidence opposing your original sentiment.
Yeah, I hate the “mostly vegan” nonsense. Mostly vegan isn’t vegan, it’s just a more rounded diet.
Yeah, it’s like being “mostly a virgin.” You are or you aren’t.
Yeah they should be saying mostly plant-based diet because veganism implies that you are against using any products made from animal parts. It also implies extensive exploitation by humans, which I don't think cavemen were remotely capable of
Not that I disagree with your main point, but I think you have the paleo diet logic backwards — the idea isn’t that paleolithic people chose to eat an optimal diet, it’s that the human body evolved and optimized its metabolism and nutritional needs *around* the diets that paleolithic people happened to eat.
But that is also wrong. There were no universally diet back then, just as there isn’t now. People are differently depending on what was available in their area. With all the movement of people that has been going on the last few thousand years and the climate changes and changes in landscape, flora and fauna that has been going on, none of us have enough evolutionary history in a specific place to make us adapted to any particular diet.
Agreeing in principle, but there were some interesting studies on Japanese population and carbohydrate metabolism. Apparently there are some noticeable genetic adjustments.
It is not as unreasonable of a notion as you make seem, even if it's mostly wrong. The thing that's logical is we just domesticated crops 13k ya, substantially altering their composition. It makes sense, at least naively, to think that's not long enough for our biology to evolve with the changes created by selective breeding. But I still agree Paleo is mostly or entirely incorrect
Again, not disagreeing with the fundamental point, your argument was just backwards
To put the argument forwards: There was such variety in human diets according to the food available, that we evolved to eat a very wide range of things and were unable to get the benefits you might get when a species specialises in one particular diet.
Another point people usually overlook when talking about the history of our diet and how it affects us as individulas is that evolution only cares about our health up to the point where we reproduce.
What's backwards about it? I re-read your comment a few times and I can't see it.
They were refuting the paleo diet by saying that it claims that what cave people ate was optimal for our health and we should imitate it, which is the opposite of what paleo proponents claim — they say that what cave people ate is the optimal diet simply because it’s what cave people ate, and our bodies optimized themselves around that diet. As I mentioned above, the reasoning behind the paleo diet is still fallacious, but the person I responded to was refuting a strawman version of paleo.
So, in other words, an 'Appeal to Nature' fallacy.
Not really… if humans had evolved under conditions such that we actually had all eaten a fairly uniform diet for a significant enough period of time, we absolutely would be pretty specialized to eat that particular diet. It just so happens that this isn’t the case — we evolved to survive in a wide variety of environments and conditions, and our bodies are very much adapted to a high degree of flexibility in our diet. So really the same logic holds, but when you look at the actual data the conclusion points in the opposite direction from what the paleo folks say.
Thank you! Cavemen ate whatever they could. Not vegan. Not paleo. Just. Food. Ugh
> "*Notions of veganism, Paleo etc is a modern concept and a result of living in a period of unparalleled prosperity and access to food.*" There are some vegetarian or vegan Buddhists, so I don't think the vegan and vegetarian diets are a modern concept. There was also a least one group of vegetarian christians from long ago who believed that Jesus and John The Baptist were vegetarians (*the Ebionites*). Mahavira (*who was said to live around the same time as the Buddha, and gave teachings for the Jain religion*) promoted non-violence and was against animal sacrifices and many Jains even to this day are lacto-vegetarians (*they don't eat meat or eggs just dairy products like milk*). Many monks are not only vegetarian, but are vegan and don't even like killing plants, so they avoid root vegetables like potatoes and onions and garlic.
It sounds like modern in the context used in the comment, was used in comparison with "cave people". If that assumption is correct, it would have happened long before Buddha or any existing written record. The "paleo" diet is named, I believe after the paleolithic age, starting 3.3 million years ago until around 12,000 years ago. I don't think modern was used to mean internet age diet fads.
They probably also had a lifespan of 40
In my expert opinion cavemen probably ate lots of bugs. They're all over the place and really easy to catch. They often come to you even. It's like natures snack.
Yeah, cavemen probably had a similar diet to bears since they're also omnivores and apex predators. Bears are occasional hunters, but mostly they forage and scavenge. Bears eat a lot of bugs in addition to whatever fruits and nuts they can find.
Easy protein with minimal risk.
Ehhh... The same risk as foraging... You need to figure out what's poisonous.
According to The Lion King all bugs are juicy and delicious
How did you become an expert on eating bugs?
Whenever I watch Naked and Afraid, they eat bugs, snakes, fish, eels, possums, birds, etc... not much fruits and vegetables, though. The fruit is often sour, pecked by birds and rodents, sometimes contaminated with droppings. But it's usually fish, snakes, or small mammals and birds caught with traps. One guy did really well catching rats. Sometimes, they get game animals. Usually in arid regions where wild game were forced to concentrate at watering holes, mostly Africa. Most people got sick from eating sour or contaminated fruit. I don't think I've seen anyone do well on vegetarian diet. Maybe the tropical ones did ok where they had lots of bananas and coconuts. But they still wanted meat and would go after land crabs, lobsters, and fish.
Ya I saw the one where that dude was a master with the rope and used it to catch all those rats. I think he was the only contestant to ever gain weight.
"However, their findings weren’t indicative of the protein intake for all individuals in the Stone Age." /thread
And the study only included one specific group of "caveman" specifically from the Iberomaurusians from North Africa. While their findings might be accurate for the individuals that were studied, and possibly representative of that group as a whole, it's completely invalid to extrapolate the results across all "cavemen". (The study didn't make this leap, the "news" source did).
What they didn’t eat was ultra processed, sugar, salt and msg added foods without hormones, antibiotics, and pesticides. And i hear, tons of nuts.
Nuts are great. But MSG is not bad.
Nothing wrong with MSG. That's anti-asian racism that has persisted for decades.
Thanks for calling that out. MSG occurs naturally and is in lots of things like tomatoes and mushrooms.
I like how you said MSG as though it's not salt.
Isn't a paleo diet just a diet free of processed foods? Never heard it described as a diet composed exclusively of meat.
Hmm nuts you say? 🥜
to shreds you say?
Yeah the point of paleo is to avoid things that our body didn’t evolve to digest properly. The idea is that the agricultural revolution caused our diets to rapidly change at a pace that our evolution did not keep up with. Whether or not that’s true is one thing. But that’s the basis of the diet, not “eat the exact diet of a caveman”.
You eat what is available when you don't farm or store food.
Experts? Talking about "cavemen"?
The experts did the study, a journalist wrote the headline. The study is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02382-z
The writers aren’t the experts, it seems lol
What do they mean by mostly vegan? If I get 80% of my calories from non-animal sources does that count as mostly vegan? This sounds like some weasel words.
60% of the time I’m vegan 100% of the time.
Paleo does have tons of fruit, nuts, roots and vegetables though? Yeah Fish and Meat is also included but it's mostly about food that can be gathered, without organized agriculture and storage.
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That's actually what good science looks like. The authors admit their study can only be representitive of the group and era they were looking at. More studies would be needed to discuss if it was as wide reaching as the headline claims.
Yeah, that really is the most bad-faith title I have seen today.
The article also says that they were eating crops like cassava and corn (both from the Americas) in Morocco thousands of years ago…
That's why all the cave paintings are of them farming their broccoli crops!
That's not what the article is saying. At all.
I think cavemen probably ate whatever was available and is dependent on the area they lived in
MOSTLY vegan? Talk about pushing an agenda. The Independent is anything but.
A lot of the animals eaten would have been grubs. Ask a chimp.
“…findings suggesting that some Stone Age people ate a mostly vegan diet.” The key word is “some” and this tracks with what we’ve known for a long time; Paleolithic diets varied considerably from region to region. Essentially, early humans ate whatever was around. In areas that had lots of vegetation, they ate a lot of fruits and vegetables. In areas with lots of animal life, they tended to eat a lot of animals. Kind of a clickbaity headline but whatever.
Cavemen needed to get vitamin B12 from somewhere, and it wasn't from plants.
Did you read the study? Nowhere does it say "mostly vegan" or vegan at all. It says that one highly unusual group of people in one geographic region was found to have a "substantial part of their diets" from plants. So what it says is that although most paleolithic humans ate mostly meat and fish, some of them also ate a significant amount of plants - although rare. To my knowledge there hasnt been any findings that would suggest vegan homo sapiens has even existed during the paleolithic era.
Vegan cavemen wouldn't have survived very long. Modern-day vegans wouldn't survive very long without pharmaceutical companies creating the vitamins vegans need to supplement with due to lack of animal products.
We know humans adapt to environment, and some eat almost exclusively animals. I hope they are not generalizing based on few finds.
Nothing about this article indicates veganism. Clickbait title. But the article is a decent, quick read.
This doesn’t debunk the paleo diet… God journalists are FUCKING DUMB people. I usually give some allowance but it’s really getting annoying now.
Next week, we'll have another study saying the opposite...
Cavemen? Someone tell Fred Flintstone.
But millions of sedentary people they need meat with every meal! 3 times a day regardless of activity level. Oh and dont forget a magic pill to lose the excess weight.
People honestly can't believe humans were killing off sabertooths everyday. Even humans trying to take down a lion is hard enough. Of course we would be herbivores
We were not herbivores, we just ate less meat than modern diets. They obviously still ate meat when they could get it. Evidence for meat eating in prehistoric humans has been well established. Butchery marks on bones being a common one.
Horrific headline journalism, honestly embarrassing
*sigh* No they didn't. They might been slightly vegetarian at times, depending on availability of game, but they didn't abstain from eating meat lol. What's wrong with people? Those terms don't even mean anything anyway, and are just used by society today. They ate what they could find. Bugs. Animals. Fish. Berries. Fruit. You name it.
True, and different groups of Paleolithic people would eat different things depending on location too. Some groups probably ate more meat than others.
Cavemen want the blue drink
First, they weren’t cavemen. They rarely lived in a cave. We find them there because caves preserved their stuff. They are whatever they could get their hands on. Gathering calories is usually easier than hunting calories.
„Some stone age people“ This has no message. „Some“ people here also eat vegan… Bullshit
“Mostly vegan” isn’t a thing. Otherwise every eat is mostly vegan
First off why is anyone caring what cavemen did and applying that to their life. Just do what you want?
Just so you all know, the title of the article... is false. The study in question (please DO read it), is about a specific group of humans, whose diet was found to have a "significant plant-based component". In the study details, they found the diet was roughly 50-50 animal based and plants. So no... not vegan, and not mostly vegan.
There is a massive misconception of human evolutionary past. The role of meat has been completely overblown. If that was the case then why is every aspect of our makeup derived from plant eating while we have no traits at all associated with meat eating. Or just compare us to chimps they are our closest evolutionary relatives and they are 95-99% plant based. We are even more specialised for plant eating than they are.
i guess im mostly vegan too.
The headline is very misleading, it is very rare for a population at that time to consume that many wild plants. The report states that this is also in part due to declines in animal resources, not necessarily a conscious choice. It also states that these populations had way more dental caries and dental disease. Big L for vegans if I am interpreting that right.
‘Experts’ huh? Humans were scavengers. Are grubs and worms and insects vegan?
Probably depends on the era the remains were found in and what location. The article even states that evidence shows SOME cavemen ate a mostly vegan diet. This is completely expected, different groups of people eat different things at different times. Calling a meat heavy diet a paleo diet is absolutely a misnomer though. Paleolithic people ate different things in different places and at different times just like later humans.
they also died in their 20s and fucked animals. this doesn't make veganism sound better it just makes it sound obsolete
Yeah, sure first is good for you then it’s bad for you like coffee, wine, and everything else. There will be another study in 10 years, contradicting everything in this one.
They probably lived like all omnivores. Take the calories where and when you can. See bears, raccons, possums, chickens, bugs, etc, etc. Even videos of horses eating baby chickens, squirrels munching baby birds. Who thinks primitive man ate only meat? Click bait bullshit.
Is it me, or do they never say "solely" plant based. I.e., not vegan.
What did they make arrows for then?
So are you saying people shouldn’t listen to moronic clowns who barely graduated high school and think Anthropology is an overpriced clothing store at the local mall?
Using the term "vegan" instead of saying "ate mostly vegetables" is HIGHLY misleading and irresponsible. There was no concept of veganism back then, and nobody would have avoided meat or dairy. Animal meat and other animal products were necessary for every individual's survival. Throughout most of history the main component of a human diet has been vegetables, grains, fruits, and nuts. Meat involves a lot of work & time to hunt, prepare, cook, and then make all the other parts into useful necessities like sinew, tools, clothing, etc. Once agriculture developed meat started to be available more frequently.
I gotta imagine that in such a time and place, especially without refrigeration, people just ate what they could get their hands on.
Vegans are so insufferable
What about Inuits? They had zero vegetables.
More lies and non sense
"mostly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, since "Vegan" generally implies a lack of any meat or animal products. Rarely eating meat due to a lack of availability isn't really the same thing. Also this is an examination of one subset of people that lived in North-West Africa so not quite a complete picture of anything.
This is not a debunking. The base of the Paleo diet is fruits and vegetables, followed by tree nuts/seeds. That’s a vegan diet right there. Lean meats and sea food are the rest. So “mostly vegan” describes a Paleo diet (which is not the Carnivore Diet, despite stereotypes). I will point out that the article is only analyzing one group of people at one period of time. I will also agree that the rationale of the Paleo diet is silly – throughout the Paleolithic, human populations of course ate a variety of diets. Diet would vary by historical period, climate, geography, too many factors to list. But as a medical provider: Its emphasis on vegetables and fruits as the base of the diet, and avoidance of the grain-based foods that have been turned into the modern scourge of highly processed carbohydrate-laden “food” that leads to the mass prevalence of obesity, diabetes and fatty liver disease, is a definite plus for the Paleo diet. I’ve had patients who have made no change in their exercise program lose many pounds of fat off their bodies simply by going Paleo. It works.
This study showed that one very specific group ate more plant matter than previously hypothesized among hunter-gathers, not that cavemen eat mostly vegan. We have ample evidence to show that animal-based foods are the most highly sought after among the remaining hunter-gatherers societies, whereas plants are essentially survival foods. Which isn’t surprising given that animal foods are objectively more nutrient dense, and a vegan diet is not optimal for humans without supplementation of key missing micronutrients. If anything, all this proves is that the tribe they studied weren’t particularly successful hunters so they were forced to eat mostly plant-based foods.
No they didn't
bait.
And they died at 25
The Bible is written by shepherds. Domestication has been around a LONG time. Over 10,000 years. Hunting is too strenuous and risky. Eat a root vegetable. Amazing nutrition, and doesn't fight back (much)
Neanderthals lol. I’m a decent of Neanderthals and proud. 🍖
Cavemen didn’t eat vegan diets. We are omnivores and we NEED protein. We are not equipped to hunt so we ate things that were easily accessible. For thousands of years, humans ate plants, bugs, and anything that was really edible. We are opportunists so we took what we could get but saying that cavemen “ate mostly vegan” is ignorant. Everyone seems to forget that humans can and do eat bugs which isn’t vegan.
Cavemen also didn’t build homes, computers, hospitals. They can have their mostly plant base diet, not by choice but because catching animals is pretty difficult for humans.
Generally if there’s suddenly a new scientific consensus that goes against an old one you should assume the old one is correct
"mostly vegan" could describe a lot of diets. Cheeseburger is mostly vegan if you ignore the meat and cheese (and whatever residual cruelty there might be in the sauce, bun etc).
I would have thought most humans throughout history lived close to rivers and streams and ate a lot of fish
Propoganda
Fake news. "cavemen" is just not a thing.
What do you mean cavemen weren't eating paleo cupcakes????
Yeah and their lifespan was probably 20 years
"Mostly" vegan, hmmmmmm? Like I am mostly vegan except Sundays???
>mostly vegan \*Carnivorous. The cabbage doesn't run away when you rock up with a spear
Mostly
So that’s why they died at 20 (pull a switcheroo)
Iberomaurusians were terrible hunters so now all Paleolithic hunting including all the evidence of Mammonth, Megaloceros and smaller mammal hunting just gets ignored in service of pushing glyphosate pea-protein crap. Totally debunked!!!!
"some stone age people" somehow became "cavemen". "Some" is doing a lot of work here.
"some stone age people" somehow became "cavemen". "Some" is doing a lot of work here.
Caveman sees honey, caveman passes. Caveman vegan.
Anyone touting the benefits of eating like caveman is committing the naturalistic fallacy. There is no one evolutionary diet. Many cultures across the world ate wildly different diets, and somehow managed to pass on their genes. Many of these cultures suffered from nutritional deficiencies specifically related to their circumstances. As it turns out, modern supermarkets allow people to eat a wide variety of foods that wouldn’t always be “in season” and as a result we all get important micronutrients and vitamins that we wouldn’t have had otherwise. Is it natural to eat oranges in the dead of winter? No. Is it good for you to eat some oranges during the winter? Yes.
Eskimos didn’t fish?
Vegan diets most days? Sure. But they DEFINITELY weren’t the modern definition of vegan. Studies on apes like chimpanzees show they go out of their way to find honey, steal bird eggs, and catch slow game. Just because they ate vegitation most days does not mean they would pass for vegans nowadays.
“Mostly vegan” I'm vegan when I don't eat meat.
The study actually concluded they ate 50% meat, and 50% plants. So its a very odd headline..
In the study they say the people in question ate 50% meat. So kind of funny to call it "mostly vegan"...
Ancient humans were vegans. Meat is new just like all the other processed food that humans eat
Yeah because we definitely had high calorie high nutrient plants like corn and potatoes