Our ancestors followed a paleo diet. There were carbs

Enlarge / A young Hadza bushman making an arrow for a hunting bow. chuvipro via Getty Images

What did people eat for dinner tens of thousands of years ago? 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 have evolved to thrive on this type of nutritional diet.

The diet takes its name from the Paleolithic era, a period dating from around 2.5 million to 10,000 years ago, when early humans hunted and gathered rather than farmed. 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 in those days subsisted on diets high in meat. Studies show that instead of a single diet, the eating habits of prehistoric peoples were remarkably variable and influenced by a number of factors, such as climate, location, and season.

In the Annual Review of Nutrition 2021, Pontzer and colleague Brian Wood of the University of California, Los Angeles describe what we can learn about the eating habits of our ancestors by studying the modern hunter—gatherer populations like the Hadza in northern Tanzania and the Aché in Paraguay. In an interview with Knowable Magazine, Pontzer explains what makes the varied and surprisingly seasonal diets of the Hadza so different from popular notions of ancient meals.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do today's paleo diets look like? How well do they reflect the eating habits of our ancestors?

People have come up with many different versions, but the original paleo diet is quite high in meat. I would say the same goes for the predominant paleo diets today - most are very high in meat and low in carbs, minimizing things like starchy vegetables and fruits that would have only been available in season. before agriculture. There is also an even more extreme camp within this, which says humans were almost entirely carnivorous carnivores.

But the diet of our ancestors was very variable. We evolved as hunter-gatherers, so you hunt and gather whatever food is in your local environment. Humans are strategic about what foods they seek out, but they can only target the foods that are there. So there was a lot of variation in what hunter-gatherers ate depending on location and time of year.

The other thing is that, partly because of this variability, but also partly because of people's preferences, there are a lot of carbohydrates in most hunter-gatherer diets. Honey has probably been important throughout history and prehistory. Many of these small-scale societies also eat root vegetables like tubers, and these are very high in starch and carbohydrates. So the idea that ancient diets were low in carbs simply doesn't match any of the available evidence.

So how did "paleo" come to represent a high-meat, low-carb diet?

I think there are several reasons for this. You have a kind of idealization of what hunting and gathering was like. There's a sort of macho caveman view of the past that permeates much of what I read when looking at paleo diet websites.

There are also inherent biases in much available archaeological and ethnographic data. In the early 1900s, and even before, many ethnographic reports were written by men who focused on men's work. We know that traditionally this is going to focus more on hunting than gathering because of the way many of these small-scale societies divide their work: men hunt and women gather.

On top of that, available ethnographic data is heavily skewed towards very northern cultures, such as arctic cultures - since cultures in warm climates were the first to be pushed back by farmers - and they tend to eat more meat. But the diet of our ancestors was variable. Populations that lived near the ocean and moving rivers ate a lot of fish and ...