What did folks eat for dinner tens of hundreds of years in the past? Many advocates of the so-called Paleo food regimen will let you know that our ancestors’ plates had been heavy on meat and low on carbohydrates—and that, because of this, we’ve developed to thrive on this sort of dietary routine.

The food regimen is known as after the Paleolithic period, a interval courting from about 2.5 million to 10,000 years in the past when early people had been searching and gathering, fairly than farming. Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University and writer of Burn, a guide concerning the science of metabolism, says it’s a fantasy that everybody of this time subsisted on meat-heavy diets. Studies present that fairly than a single food regimen, prehistoric folks’s consuming habits had been remarkably variable and had been influenced by various components, resembling local weather, location and season.

In the 2021 Annual Review of Nutrition, Pontzer and his colleague Brian Wood, of the University of California, Los Angeles, describe what we are able to study concerning the consuming habits of our ancestors by learning fashionable hunter-gatherer populations just like 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, numerous diets so completely different from fashionable notions of historical meals.

This interview has been edited for size and readability.

What do as we speak’s Paleo diets appear to be? How nicely do they seize our ancestors’ consuming habits?

People have developed many alternative variations, however the authentic Paleo food regimen is kind of meat-heavy. I’d say the identical is true of the predominant Paleo diets as we speak—most are very meat-heavy and low-carb, downplaying issues like starchy greens and fruits that will solely have been seasonally out there earlier than agriculture. There’s additionally an much more excessive camp inside that, which says that people was virtually fully meat-eating carnivores.

But our ancestors’ diets had been actually variable. We developed as hunter-gatherers, so that you’re searching and gathering no matter meals are round in your native setting. Humans are strategic about what meals they go after, however they’ll goal solely the meals which might be there. So there was plenty of variation in what hunter-gathers ate relying on location and time of 12 months.

The different factor is that, partly resulting from that variability, but additionally partly due simply to folks’s preferences, there’s plenty of carbohydrate in most hunter-gatherer diets. Honey was in all probability essential all through historical past and prehistory. Lots of these small-scale societies are additionally consuming root greens like tubers, and people are very starch- and carb-heavy. So the concept that historical diets could be low-carbohydrate simply doesn’t match with any of the out there proof.

So how did “Paleo” come to characterize meat-heavy and low-carb consuming?

I feel there are a few causes for that. You have a type of romanticizing of what searching and gathering was like. There is a type of macho caveman view of the previous that permeates plenty of what I learn after I have a look at Paleo food regimen web sites.

There are additionally inherent biases in plenty of the out there archaeological and ethnographic information. In the early 1900s, and even earlier than, plenty of the ethnographic stories had been written by males who targeted on males’s work. We know that historically that’s going to focus extra on searching than on gathering due to the way in which plenty of these small-scale societies divide their work: Men hunt and girls collect.

On prime of that, the out there ethnographic information is closely skewed towards very northern cultures, resembling Arctic cultures—for the reason that warm-weather cultures had been the primary ones to get pushed out by farmers—they usually do are inclined to eat extra meat. But our ancestors’ diets had been variable. Populations that lived close to the ocean and transferring rivers ate plenty of fish and seafood. Populations that lived in forested areas or in locations wealthy in vegetation targeted on consuming crops.

There can be a bias towards searching within the archaeological report. Stone instruments and cut-marked bones—proof of searching—protect very nicely. Wooden sticks and plant stays don’t.