What Did People in the Paleolithic Really Eat?

The so-called “Paleolithic diet” is a fad diet, which advocates that people can lose weight and live healthier by eating the same foods our distant ancestors ate thousands of years ago during the Paleolithic Era, which lasted from the invention of stone tools roughly 3.3 million years ago until the Agricultural Revolution around 12,000 years ago. This diet originated in the 1970s and was popularized in the 2000s, primarily by the bestselling American writer Loren Cordain.

The Paleolithic diet is predicated on what is known as the “genetic discordance hypothesis,” which holds that, while the environment in which human beings live and the foods human beings eat have drastically changed since the end of the Paleolithic Era, the human genome has hardly changed at all. Therefore, proponents of the diet insist that human beings are not adapted to eat the foods we are now eating and we must return to eating the foods our ancestors ate over 12,000 years ago.

This diet claims that people should eat a diet that consists of meat, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and roots. People on the diet are usually prohibited from eating any grains, dairy products, sugars, legumes, salts, oils, alcohol, or caffeine, since, according to proponents of the diet, these are foods that did not exist during the Paleolithic Era. Unfortunately for practitioners of the diet, it actually bears very little resemblance to what people during the Paleolithic Era actually ate.

Which “Paleolithic diet” are we talking about?

The Paleolithic Era lasted somewhere in the ballpark of three million years. It is the longest period in all of human history. Over the course of the Paleolithic Era, humans evolved from hairy, chimpanzee-like australopithecines who ate their food raw into fully modern humans with sophisticated tools, fire, and agriculture. Naturally, the human diet changed drastically over the course of that time.

Furthermore, even at any given time, humans living in one area nearly always ate drastically different foods from humans living in another area. For instance, people living near the sea would have probably eaten lots of fish; whereas people living in a forest with lots of berry bushes would have probably eaten lots of berries. Quite simply, people ate whatever they could find and, in different areas, there were different foods available. The diets of various peoples living during the Paleolithic Era therefore varied drastically.

This problem is further compounded by the fact that, by the end of the Paleolithic Era, humans were living all over the planet. There were people living in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, East Asia, Australia, North America, South America. By that time, Antarctica was the only continent with no humans living on it. Obviously, then, people living in North America 15,000 years ago were eating very different foods from people living in Europe 150,000 years ago and people living in East Africa three million years ago were eating very different foods from people living in East Asia 700,000 years ago.

To speak as though there was ever such a thing as a single “Paleolithic diet” at all is extremely naïve; what people ate during the Paleolithic Era varied from region to region at least as drastically as it does today.

Uh… that’s not what that food was like during the Paleolithic

The fact that our Paleolithic ancestors ate different things depending on when and where they lived is just the beginning. There is also the inherent problem that all the plants and animals that we get our food from have undergone millennia of intense selective breeding by humans and are, in most cases, nearly completely unrecognizable from their wild ancestors.

For instance, look at this image, taken from Wikimedia Commons:

On the far left is teosinte, a Mexican plant that is the wild ancestor of modern maize. In the middle is an ear of a pre-modern variety of selectively bred maize. On the far right is an ear of fully modern maize as you might see in a field in the Midwestern United States. As you can clearly see, the plant has undergone a complete transformation from a tiny stalk with a few fruitcases to a gigantic ear with rows upon rows of exposed kernels.

All the fruits we know today are the products of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of selective breeding by humans as well. For instance, bananas as we know them today did not exist during the Paleolithic Era. Wild bananas did exist in Southeast Asia and Indonesia during the Paleolithic, but these bananas are small with hard, thick outer flesh. They resemble cacao pods and are filled with dozens of hard, inedible seeds, each one roughly five to six millimeters in diameter. They don’t have much fruit in them and what fruit they do have is unappetizing.

Bananas were first domesticated on the island of New Guinea around 10,000 to 6,500 years ago during the Neolithic. The Cavendish banana, the variety of banana that is most commonly eaten today, first became commonly eaten in the 1950s after the older cultivar of banana, the Gros Michel, was nearly wiped out by Panama disease.

ABOVE: Photograph of one variety of wild banana, which is small and filled with large, inedible seeds

A large number of the vegetables we eat today—namely broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, collard greens, kale, kohlravi, savoy, and gai lan—all come from the same wild ancestor: Brassica oleracea, a wild biennial plant native to southern and western Europe. Brassica oleracea was first domesticated in Italy sometime around the seventh century BC. All the vegetables that we get from cultivars of Brassica oleracea have been created since then. In other words, all of these vegetables were totally created by humans; they didn’t exist at all during the Paleolithic Era.

ABOVE: Photograph of the wild cabbage plant, the wild ancestor of broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, collard greens, kale, kohlravi, savoy, and gai lan

This is not just true for plants; all the animals we eat have been selectively bred too and are completely different from their wild ancestors that existed during the Paleolithic Era. For instance, the domestic pig, one of the most commonly eaten animals today, is descended from the Eurasian wild boar, which was first domesticated in the Near East sometime between c. 13,000 and c. 12,700 BC. Pigs have been continuously selectively bred by humans ever since then to be better suited for meat production.

ABOVE: Photograph of a modern specimen of wild boar

ABOVE: Photograph of a female “Large White,” the breed of domestic pig that is most commonly eaten today

Only available in some areas

Also, even the wild ancestors of the plants and animals we eat today were only available to humans in some areas during the Paleolithic. For instance, wild cabbage was only available in Europe, wild bananas were only available in Southeast Asia, wild teosinte was only available in Central America, and so on. These foods did not become available globally until long after the end of the Paleolithic Era.

The domestic chicken, one of the most commonly eaten animals today, is descended from the red junglefowl, a tropical bird native only to Southeast Asia, parts of Indonesia, and the Philippines. The red junglefowl was first domesticated around 3,000 BC in India and first introduced to Europe through Greece in around the seventh century BC. The ancient Greeks seem to have, for a time at least, thought of it as a strange, exotic animal; they called it “the Persian bird.”

The domestic chicken was first introduced to the Americas in the 1490s AD through the Columbian Exchange. This means that, not only did the domestic chicken not exist during the Paleolithic Era, but, during the Paleolithic Era, only a tiny fraction of all people on Earth would have been able to eat even the wild ancestor of the domestic chicken.

I could go on and on and on talking about how utterly different the foods we eat are from their wild ancestors that existed during the Paleolithic Era and how even those wild ancestors would have only been available in some areas, but I think you all probably get my point.

ABOVE: Photograph of a modern male red junglefowl, a tropical bird native to Southeast Asia and the wild ancestor of the domestic chicken

ABOVE: Photograph of a modern commercial broiler chicken, the kind of chicken that is most commonly eaten today, in a factory farm

But what about wild fruits, vegetables, animals, or so forth?

Now, you may think that only eating wild fruits and vegetables and meat from wild animals might solve this problem, but that is not the case either; even wild fruits, vegetables, and animals have evolved drastically over the course of the past three million years. Admittedly, in most cases, wild organisms have not evolved as drastically as their domesticated counterparts, but they have still evolved.

You can eat a diet of all meats, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and roots like the so-called “Paleolithic diet” recommends, but, no matter what you do, the meats, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and roots you eat will be twenty-first-century meats, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and roots—not Paleolithic ones.

Meanwhile, there are many other species of wild plants and animals that existed during the Paleolithic Era that no longer exist in any form today. Many of the wild animals our distant ancestors hunted are completely extinct. For instance, we know that people in Eurasia during the Upper Paleolithic sometimes hunted woolly mammoths and that people in North America sometimes hunted mastodons, but woolly mammoths and mastodons have both been totally extinct for thousands of years, meaning there’s no way you can eat them.

Furthermore, it is extremely important to emphasize that “more natural” does not equate to “healthier.” Wild bitter almonds contain extremely high levels of cyanide that may be lethal; whereas domesticated almonds obviously do not contain high quantities of cyanide. (They are still potentially lethal to people like me, though, since I am deathly allergic to tree nuts, but that is a story for another time.)

ABOVE: Reconstruction from Wikimedia Commons of a woolly mammoth (left) and a North American mastodon (right). At least some people in Eurasia and North America during the Paleolithic are known to have hunted these animals, but now they are extinct.

Not nearly as much meat as you think

Now that I have talked about how it is virtually impossible for a modern person to eat like a genuine Paleolithic hunter-gatherer, let’s talk a little bit more about what people in Paleolithic times actually ate, because much of what people in those times actually ate doesn’t line up with what the Paleolithic diet recommends.

Most people assume that people during the Paleolithic Era ate a lot of meat and, consequently, the Paleolithic diet recommends eating lots of meat. In reality, however, it is likely that people during the Paleolithic Era ate far less meat than the average person today. Quite simply, the only way to acquire meat in the Paleolithic Era was to hunt it yourself and hunting wasn’t always easy. Furthermore, people during the Paleolithic Era had no refrigeration or modern preservatives, meaning meat had to be eaten almost immediately after animal was killed, since it would quickly begin to rot.

As a result of this, during the Paleolithic Era, no matter when or where you happened to live, meat was probably more of a rare treat than an everyday food item. When people did have meat, often times it wasn’t any kind of meat that we would be accustomed to eating. I have already mentioned how some people during some periods of the Paleolithic ate meat from animals that are now extinct, but some people certainly also sometimes ate meat from animals that we in the western world are not accustomed to eating, including meat from animals that we probably wouldn’t find very appetizing.

It is also important to point out here that, during times of hardship, many of our Paleolithic ancestors may not have had any access to meat at all. Obviously, if there were no animals for them to hunt, then they didn’t get any meat. Due to modern factory farming, modern transportation, modern refrigeration, and modern preservatives, meat is far, far more widely available today than it has ever been before in human history.

The average person today almost certainly consumes many times more meat than even the most voracious meat-eaters during the Paleolithic Era. Ironically, then, if you really want to eat like a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer, then you probably shouldn’t eat very much meat.

They actually had bread in the late Paleolithic Era…

The Paleolithic diet absolutely, utterly prohibits its followers from eating bread products because, according to the diet’s proponents, breadmaking did not exist during the Paleolithic Era. It is true that bread did not exist for most of the Paleolithic Era, because humans had not begun making it, but, by the last few thousands years of the Paleolithic Era, people were, in fact, at least in some areas, already making bread.

We have archaeological evidence of this. For instance, the recent discovery of tiny bread crumbs from a late Paleolithic fireplace in northeast Jordan has shown that, by at least the last 3,000 years of the Paleolithic Era, people were already making bread. Tobias Richter, an archaeologist who has studied the history of breadmaking, is quoted in an article from The Guardian from July 2018 as saying, “Bread has been seen as a product of agriculturist, settled societies, but our evidence from Jordan now basically predates the onset of plant cultivation … by at least 3,000 years.”

Of course, even here, it is important to note that the kinds of grain that humans in the Near East during the late Paleolithic were making bread from are different from the kinds of grains that we make bread from today. Likewise, their techniques for making bread were almost certainly nothing at all like any of the techniques that are used today for bread-making. Nevertheless, they were, in fact, making a kind of bread, which means that at least some humans have been eating bread continuously for at least the past 15,000 years or so.

ABOVE: Image from the article in The Guardian of the fireplace in Jordan where archaeologists uncovered bread crumbs from the late Paleolithic Era

The basic premise behind the “Paleolithic diet” is false

You can’t really eat like a person from the Paleolithic and the so-called “Paleolithic diet” is not even a vaguely accurate representation of how people during Paleolithic times most likely ate. Fortunately, there is no reason why you should want to eat like a person from the Paleolithic Era because the whole premise behind the Paleolithic diet is wrong.

Advocates of the Paleolithic diet assume that we are naturally adapted for eating foods that people ate during the Paleolithic Era and that we have not had enough time to adapt to eating non-Paleolithic foods. This is false. Humans have, in fact, adapted to eat an enormous variety of foods. Even in Paleolithic times, our ancestors were able to adapt quickly to a diverse range of new diets as they migrated into new lands.

Furthermore, humans have, in fact, evolved considerably since the Paleolithic. For instance, some humans—mainly those descended from people who lived in Europe, parts of West Africa, and the Middle East—have evolved the ability to digest lactose as adults, a feat of which most of our Paleolithic ancestors were incapable.

On top of this, the microbial biomes inside our bodies have also been evolving. If we have been evolving over the course of the past 12,000 years, then we can assume our microbial biomes have been evolving even more rapidly, meaning we probably have different bacteria living in our guts from our distant Paleolithic ancestors, a fact which probably has significant impact on what kinds of foods we are able to digest.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the prevalence of lactase persistence among the indigenous populations of the Old World

Conclusion

It is objectively impossible for us to actually reconstruct, let alone eat, the diet of our distant ancestors from over 12,000 years ago, not only because our evidence is very limited, but also because different peoples living in different places and different times ate very different things.

Furthermore, the foods forbidden and recommended by the so-called “Paleolithic diet” do not even align with our best evidence of what food in the Paleolithic was like. Ironically, meat—one of the main foods recommended by the diet—is a food that people in Paleolithic times probably ate much more rarely than people today. Meanwhile, bread—one of the foods that is absolutely, utterly, thoroughly, undeniably verboten under the Paleolithic diet—actually existed during the Paleolithic after all, at least for the last 3,000 years or so.