Tens of thousands of years ago, what did people eat for dinner? Many proponents of the so-called Paleo diet will tell you that our ancestors’ plates were high in meat and low in carbs — and as a result, we evolved to thrive on this type of dietary regimen.
The diet is named after the Paleolithic era, a period that dates from about 2.5 million to 10,000 years ago, when early humans hunted and gathered rather than agriculture. Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University and author of: Burn, a book on the science of metabolism, says it’s a myth that everyone these days lived on a heavy meat diet. Studies show that rather than a single diet, the diets of prehistoric humans were remarkably variable and influenced by a number of factors, such as climate, location and season.
In the 2021 Annual overview of nutrition, Pontzer and his colleague Brian Wood, of the University of California, Los Angeles, describe what we can learn about our ancestors’ diets by studying modern hunter-gatherer populations such as the Hadza in northern Tanzania and the Aché in Paraguay. In an interview with Knowable Magazine, Pontzer explains what makes the Hadza’s surprisingly seasonal, diverse diets so different from popular beliefs about old meals.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are the current paleo diets like? How well do they accommodate the eating habits of our ancestors?
People have developed many different versions, but the original Paleo diet is quite a lot of meat. I’d say the same is true of today’s predominant Paleo diets—most are very meat-heavy and low-carb, downplaying things like starchy fruits and vegetables that would have been available seasonally only before farming. There’s also an even more extreme camp in there that says humans used to be almost entirely carnivorous carnivores.
But the diet of our ancestors was very variable. We evolved as hunter-gatherers, so you hunt and collect whatever food is in your local environment. People are strategic about what food they look for, but they can only focus on the food that is there. So there was a lot of variation in what hunter-gatherers ate, depending on the location and the time of year.
The other thing is that, partly because of that variability, but also partly because of people’s preferences, there are plenty of carbohydrates in most hunter-gatherer diets. Honey was probably important in history and prehistoric times. Many of these small-scale societies also eat root vegetables such as tubers, which are very starchy and carbohydrate-rich. So the idea that old diets would be low-carb just doesn’t fit the available evidence.
So how did “Paleo” represent meat-heavy and low-carb eating?
I think there are a few reasons for that. You kind of romanticize what hunting and gathering was like. There’s a kind of macho caveman image of the past that permeates much of what I read when I look at paleo diet websites.
There are also inherent biases in much of the available archaeological and ethnographic data. In the early 1900s, and even before that, many of the ethnographic reports were written by men devoted to men’s work. We know that traditionally that will focus more on hunting than gathering because of the way many of these small-scale societies divide their work: men hunt and women gather.
In addition, the available ethnographic data is strongly skewed toward very northern cultures, such as Arctic cultures — as the cultures were the first to be expelled by farmers in warm weather — and they tend to eat more meat. But the diet of our ancestors was variable. Peoples living near the ocean and moving rivers ate a lot of fish and seafood. Populations living in forested areas or in vegetation rich places were oriented to eat plants.
There is also a bias towards hunting in the archaeological record. Stone tools and incised bones – evidence of hunting – are very well preserved. Wooden sticks and plant remains are not.
