For the true nutrition of early humans, eat everything.
Nutrition influencers claim that we deserve to eat a meat-rich diet, just as our ancestors did, but our ancestors didn’t eat that way.
By Kate Wong
Miriam Martincic
Paul Saladino, shirtless, with bulging biceps, works back and forth with a butcher’s saw on the femur of a cow. When, in spite of everything, he cuts the bone, a crowd of spectators erupts with joy. With a smile, he checks that he is while being filmed, takes a spoonful of marrow from the center of a piece of bone and puts it in the mouth of an enthusiastic young woman like a priest in communion.
Saladin, a physician, is a popular advocate of animal-based nutrition that exalts meat and organs and demonizes vegetables. Through videos like this one on TikTok, as well as in the podcast he hosts, he preaches the importance of eating beef and liver. marrow and testicles for millions of fans on social networks. He is the author of the 2020 e-book The Carnivore Code and another major cookbook. He founded Heart and Soil, a company that sells organ-based supplements, and co-founded Lineage Provisions. which sells protein powder and meat sticks. Saladin argues that the classical food pyramid, with its broad base of plant foods that is reduced to animal foods, is upside down and that the medical establishment’s view that higher cholesterol is the central reason for disease is wrong. He says that meat and organs are the key to health, strength, and vitality.
Saladin is not alone in his carnivorous activities. TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are full of influencers offering meat-centric menus. Like the so-called paleo or caveman nutritions above, those nutritions are ultra-processed foods such as chips, breakfast cereals, packaged breads, soda, and sausage. But they’re particularly more restrictive than paleo nutrition when it comes to plant foods. Some proponents, including Saladin and famed adventurer Bear Grylls, allow a limited amount of fruit but advise against vegetables, which they say are loaded with defensive chemicals that are poisonous. humans. Others, such as Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and his podcast host daughter, Mikhaila, advocate for nutrition consisting solely of beef, salt, and water. Many, like social media personality Brian Johnson, also known as Liver King, propose eating animal products, and add dairy and eggs, raw.
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Meat influencers, as they are called, refer to their nutrition as “ancestral,” consisting of foods consumed through our predecessors before them. If this is what our ancestors ate, they say, then this is what the human body should consume. “If you align your nutrition and way of life with millions of years of human and hominid evolution,” Saladino says in another TikTok post, “that’s how humans thrive. “
Studies of the remains of our ancestors, as well as observations of living primates and modern hunter-gatherers, refute the concept that humans evolved to subsist primarily on animals. Meat has played a vital role in our evolution. But that doesn’t mean they’re meant to eat like lions. True ancestral human diets are difficult to reconstruct accurately, but they were far more varied than the more commonly meat-based diets of carnivores, a finding that has important implications for what other people eat today to be healthy.
To be fair to proponents of meat-based diets, scientists have historically paid close attention to meat consumption throughout human evolution, as have journalists writing about our origins (myself included). Several points have contributed to this trend. For one thing, humans are unique among primates in hunting animals more giant or more giant than us, and scientists are interested in understanding the characteristics that distinguish us from other creatures. On the other hand, stone equipment and the bones of sacrificed animals are better preserved. in the archaeological record that the fragile remains of plants. And then there’s the fact that hunting animals (especially giant, harmful mammals like elephants) is inherently more exciting than the leisurely activity of picking berries, nuts, and root vegetables. Either way, it doesn’t take much Googling to locate a bunch of clinical articles and popular articles touting the concept that hunting and eating meat has made us human.
Interest in the role of meat and hunting in human origins is deeply rooted. Charles Darwin even speculated on its importance in his 1871 treatise, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Ideas about how carnivores shaped human evolution have been replaced over the years, but the prevailing wisdom is this: about two million years ago, Homo erectus, one of the first members of our genus , began to evolve the proportions of the fashionable human body, with longer legs, shorter arms, a smaller intestine, and a giant brain. The earliest stone and animal bone equipment with cut marks predates this period. The timing suggests that the invention of sharp stone equipment allowed early humans to slaughter giant animals and gain access to a new source of calories. This nutritious food required less processing in the gastrointestinal tract, allowing our energy-intensive intestinal tissue to shrink. High-calorie meat also provided the fuel that allowed our energy-intensive brains to grow. A feedback loop ensued: As the brain developed, our clever ancestors devised increasingly efficient equipment for obtaining energy-rich animal foods, thus fueling the expansion of the Homo brain.
Humans evolved to eat a variety of foods, just meat. Versatility is the secret to our success.
Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post Getty Images
If that were all we know about human evolution, it would be tempting to conclude that we evolved to eat meat. But that’s only part of what anthropologists and archaeologists have learned about food and human origins, and even about this bankruptcy of our history. It has been revised over the past 15 years in light of new evidence. New fossil discoveries and DNA research reveal what our ancestors ate in unprecedented detail. To better understand the evolution of humanity and our diet, we want to take a closer look at what happened. before and after those two million years.
Let’s start at the beginning. Humans, apes, and wonder apes are a subset of primates called higher primates, which have evolved to eat fruits. The lineage of hominids (Homo sapiens and its extinct relatives, as well as Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and others) dates back about six to seven million years. Fossils of the earliest known hominids imply that they walked upright on two legs, but still spent a lot of time in trees. They do not seem to have made stone equipment and subsisted on nutrition similar to that of chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living beings. relatives, i. e. , most commonly fruits, nuts, seeds, roots, flowers, and leaves, as well as insects and insects. Occasional small mammal.
Throughout the early part of our known history, hominids seem to have maintained this plant-based diet: they left no record of meat consumption. It’s not until just about 3 million years after the start of our lineage that there is evidence that giant animals were exploited for food.
The earliest imaginable evidence of meat consumption by hominids comes from Dikika, Ethiopia. Researchers discovered fragments of mammalian bones the length of a goat and cow with markings reminiscent of a butchery that occurred at least 3. 39 million years ago. The butcher, in this case, was probably Australopithecus afarensis, the small-bodied, small-brained hominid species to which Lucy’s celebrated fossil, the only known hominid species from that time and place, belongs. Although no equipment was discovered, researchers discovered it in the wound in the bones. He concluded that A. Afarensis used sharp stones to remove the flesh from the bones and struck the bones with blunt stones to access the marrow inside.
The oldest stone equipment comes from Lomekwi in northwestern Kenya. Like Dikika’s cut-out bones, these 3. 3-million-year-old kits predate the origin of our genus, Homo, and appear to be paintings of small australopithecines with brains. The two events also appear to be isolated in time, a blip in evolution, separated by the earliest evidence of stone equipment and butchery over thousands of years.
It wasn’t until two million years ago that hominids began incorporating big game into their diets more regularly, according to Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History who studies the evolution of meat consumption in humans. The Kanjera South site in southwestern Kenya, which records hominin activities about two million years ago, is one of the first sites to maintain evidence of what researchers call a persistent carnivorous matrix. There, early members of Homo transported selection rocks up to 10 kilometers away to make their stone equipment. They used that equipment to extract meat and marrow from a variety of mammals that live in the surrounding grasslands, from small antelopes to wildebeest-sized bovids. Some antelopes appear to have been acquired intact, probably through hunting. The larger animals would possibly have been recovered. Regardless of how they received the carcasses, the Kanjera hominins slaughtered the animals at this site for generations, with the bones covering a three-meter-thick layer of sediment.
Kanjera hominids returned to this place again and again to slaughter animals, but their persistent carnivore tendency did not prevail elsewhere. Nor was it followed by a steady increase in meat consumption over time, as might be expected in the comment cycle scenario. . Andrew Barr of George Washington University and his colleagues, adding to Pobiner, analyzed evidence of hominin meat consumption in the East African zooarchaeological record dating to 2. 6 million to 1. 2 million years ago. Although evidence of meat consumption increased soon after, two million years ago with the beginning of H. erectus, the first hominid to reach modern body proportions, the study found that this trend is the result of sampling bias: the researchers simply collected more archaeological information from this era than from earlier periods. Their findings, Barr, Pobiner and their co-authors concluded, we shouldn’t speculate that meat made us human.
“When I think about nutritional adjustments over time, I don’t think the replacement has been linear,” Pobiner says. In many ways, the adjustments have had more to do with expanding nutrition than going from vegetarian to meat-eating, she says. “Humans are omnivores,” she says. “We have been omnivores. “
Even in Kanjera, with its impressive accumulation of cut bones, meat is not the only food on offer. Analyses of the cutting edges of a stone equipment pattern from the site revealed that most of the equipment exhibits wear patterns characteristic of the equipment used in experiments to cut the herbaceous plants and their underground organs (the tubers, bulbs, roots, and rhizomes) that the plants produce to store carbohydrates. A smaller proportion showed symptoms of animal tissue transformation.
Although the evolution of meat consumption is in the middle of his work, Pobiner says, “that doesn’t mean I think it was the most vital detail of human nutrition in the early days. “
It’s conceivable that early humans would target fats rather than meat when they began slaughtering animals. Jessica Thompson of Yale University and her colleagues say that before hominins invented stone equipment suitable for hunting giant animals, they may have simply used simpler equipment to retrieve abandoned animals. corpses in search of their nutrients for the marrow and brain. Lean meat, like that of wild animals, consumes a lot of energy to metabolize and, in the absence of dietary fats, can cause protein poisoning and other problems. Breaking the recovered bones for The bone marrow may have produced the extra nutrients needed for brain expansion before our ancestors developed the more complex generation needed for hunting.
The fats and meat of land mammals were not the only imaginable source of extra calories for hungry hominids. Fish, crustaceans, and other aquatic animals and plants fed our ancestors who lived near rivers, lakes, and oceans. As early as 1. 95 million years ago. Once upon a time, Homo exploited fish and turtles, among other aquatic foods, in Kenya’s Turkana Basin.
Our ancestors would also possibly have extracted more calories from plant and animal foods by cooking them. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University proposed that cooking, which makes food less difficult to chew and digest, could also have provided Homo with the extra fuel needed to feed. a larger brain. In 2022, researchers announced that they had discovered fish remains that may also have been cooked over a controlled fire 780,000 years ago at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel.
There’s one place where scientists can look for clues about what early humans ate: their teeth. When the researchers analyzed tartar preserved in the stained teeth of two American Australopithecus sediba from South Africa, they discovered microscopic pieces of silica from plants that those hominins ate nearly two million years ago, adding bark, leaves, reeds, and grasses.
Even Neanderthals, our stocky cousins who ruled Eurasia for thousands of years and are known for being professional big game hunters, fed on plants. Amanda Henry, from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and her colleagues discovered lines of legumes, dates and wild barley in the tartar of their fossilized teeth. And researchers led by Karen Hardy of the University of Glasgow discovered roasted starch granules on the teeth of Neanderthals, indicating that they ate cooked vegetables. Some Neanderthals have even abandoned animal meat altogether: In a co-led study According to Laura Weyrich of Pennsylvania State University, analyses of DNA preserved in Neanderthal tartar discovered in El Sidrón cave in Spain revealed lines of pine nuts, moss and fungi, and no meat at all.
Researchers have developed other techniques to examine what hominids put in their mouths and chew, such as measuring chemical isotopes in their teeth, but those strategies have vital limitations: They can’t measure the proportion of animal-based foods compared to plant foods in nutrition. . In this sense, some other studies on tartar give an idea. James Fellows Yates of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and his colleagues analyzed DNA from bacteria preserved in Neanderthal stones and compared it to bacterial DNA from the teeth of chimpanzees, gorillas, howler monkeys and modern humans. The team discovered that Neanderthals and modern humans in their form had a network of Streptococcus bacteria in their mouths that non-human primates did not have. These strep bacteria eat the sugars in starchy foods, such as roots, seeds, and tubers. Its presence in the mouths of Neanderthals and modern humans (although not in those of non-human primates, which feed mainly on non-starchy plant parts) indicates that Homo had adapted to an abundant intake of plant foods rich in starch during the time when Neanderthals and modern humans separated from their families. last shared community. ancestor about 600,000 years ago. This timing suggests that carbohydrate-rich nutrition helped fuel brain expansion in Homo.
Other features of teeth recommend additional pathways in the quest to perceive what our ancestors ate. If you look at the morphology of hominid teeth over time, says paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist Peter Ungar of the University of Arkansas, you’ll see that australopithecines had large, flat teeth with thick enamel, characteristics that imply they specialized in grinding hard foods like seeds. Homo, on the other hand, evolved with smaller teeth with ridges better suited to eating hard foods, especially meat. However, it is evident that we lack long, sharp teeth. dogs that carnivores possess to stab and tear apart their prey, as well as sharp carnivorous teeth to cut meat.
“We’re not natural carnivores, we never have been,” Ungar says. “Our teeth are not designed to eat meat. “That’s not to say we can’t eat animal tissue, he notes: Cutting and cooking meat makes it less difficult. so we can eat, but “anyone who chews beef jerky long enough knows that our teeth aren’t really designed for it. . . Or, actually, a raw steak.
The microscopic bites and scratches that food leaves on your teeth convey this message. While the microattrition patterns of australopithecines reflect a narrow diversity of food types, early Homo exhibit somewhat wider diversity. Later members of our genus exhibit micro-wear texture patterns that imply they have eaten even more types of food. While this evidence is limited, Ungar says, it suggests that Homo has become a more flexible eater, able to consume a wider variety of foods than its predecessors. This versatility would have served our ancestors in addition to extending to new environments providing a greater diversity of types of food on offer.
Proponents of animal-based diets like to cite the Hadza, a foraging organization in northern Tanzania, to justify their excessive meat consumption. Saladin and Liver King check them out in their social media videos. I can tell you very clearly, The Hadza don’t give a damn about vegetables. They don’t actually eat vegetables,” says Saladino, who visited the Hadza on an organized excursion for hikers.
Anthropologists who live with the Hadza and have studied their nutrition for years would disagree. Herman Pontzer of Duke University notes that for decades, researchers have observed that plant foods make up at least 50 percent of Hadza nutrition. The Hadza are not exclusive to In this regard. Hunter-gatherers around the world get part of their calories from plant foods and the other part from animal foods. But this average obscures the true price of the hunting and gathering strategy, which is that it allows other people to subsist on a wide variety. depending on what’s in their environment at a given time of year. Long-term studies on Hadza show that in a few months they can get the most out of their calories from honey; In other months, they may consume plant foods at most, adding tubers. There are times when they don’t eat meat at most.
What made humans so triumphant was not that we replaced plants with animals, but that we added hunting to our cultural history. Hunting and gathering reliably produce more calories per day than any other strategy for primates, Pontzer says. The reason it works is that it’s a blended portfolio. ” “There are other people who are looking for high-value, hard-to-get, high-protein and high-fat animals, which is great,” he says. And there are other people who are looking for more reliable plant-based foods. It’s the balance of those elements that makes it successful. “
In fact, hunting and gathering produces so many calories that other people can share them with other members of the group, including children, whose brains take longer to expand than other species and who need more time to learn to fend for themselves. A strict meat eater can’t do this, because although the number of calories you can consume each day through plants is very reliable, it may not be high enough to produce excess calories. Enjoy long periods of hunger between meals that, on average, do not generate additional calories. But when we put those two things together, Pontzer observes, we generate a surplus. And this surplus, he surmises, is the variable that has made human things energy-intensive, such as a large brain and a prolonged childhood.
What the fossil, archaeological and ethnographic evidence indicates, then, is that there is no single nutrition that nature has prescribed for us. What our ancestors ate varied greatly over time and space, depending largely on what they could eat. As the seasons changed, the climate changed and populations spread to new ecosystems. Forged in this crucible of uncertainty, we have developed the ability to thrive on an impressive diversity of foods. Hunter-gatherers around the world are nourished by very different proportions of plant and animal foods, and all appear to be healthy, protected from central diseases, diabetes, and other diseases not unusual in commercial populations.
So, what does a user looking to eat healthy deserve to do?”I think that means you deserve to feel free to check out other diets and find one that works for you,” Pontzer says. But “when someone tells you there’s only one way to eat, they are and you can avoid hearing them. “
Kate Wong is an award-winning science publisher and editor-in-chief of Scientific American focusing on evolution, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, and animal behavior. She is fascinated by human origins, which she has been covering for more than 25 years. years. Recently, he has become obsessed with birds. Her reports have taken her to caves in France and Croatia where Neanderthals once lived, to the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya in search of the world’s oldest stone tools, to Madagascar as part of an expedition to unearth ancient mammals and dinosaurs, in the icy waters of Antarctica. where humpback whales dine on krill, and in a “Big Day” race around the state of Connecticut to locate as many bird species as imaginable in 24 hours. Kate co-authors, with Donald Johanson, Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Biological Anthropology and Zoology from the University of Michigan. Follow Wong on X (formerly Twitter) @katewong
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