I’m talking about before we figured out we could grow vegetables and fruits. Early humans are often shown as being fit and in shape, yet our diet pretty much only consisted of meat. We were hunters. So why the hell were they so fit? I thought a healthy diet mattered more than just being active constantly?
Probably because meat was only a small fraction of their diet.
Most cavemen were foragers, they would also fish, and look for a lot of things that were edible. Wild fruits and berries, roots, primitive plants ancestors of the ones that are now cultivated, etc.
Meat meant hunting, and hunting was dangerous, long and difficult. After a while, they would move on once game got rarer.
So, no, meat was not their only source of food.
Your premise is wrong, our diet has never consisted pretty much only of meat. We were hunter-gatherers, gatherer being a very important part of that phrase.
The diet of the earliest hominins was probably somewhat similar to the diet of modern chimpanzees: omnivorous, including large quantities of fruit, leaves, flowers, bark, insects and meat.
Mmmmmm… nothing gets me hungry like the thought of squirming insects!
Hakuna Matata!
Why would early humans have a mostly meat diet? There’s plenty of foragable herbs, vegetables, and fruits to eat. Go to anywhere near the equator. Bananas grow on the trees.
We also have archeological evidence that producing beer happened before agriculture. So us humans were clearly pretty experimental with food.
Ancient humans probably ate a great diversity of plant life than we did!
The fruits and vegetables that we know today are nothing like those from 10k years ago. Bananas of today didn’t exist even a few 100 years ago.
The wild ancestors of our modern food did exist. And there’s a reason we have highly advanced cultivars of those foods, it’s because people were eating them before they were cultivated. Once agriculture started, people took the foods they regularly foraged and started to grow them. Then they would replant the ones they liked and toss/eat the seeds of the ones they didn’t. Do that a few thousand years and you’ve got highly edible and great tasting produce, but it all started with people trying to grow what they already ate.
Yes but they were not what we have today. Lower sugar content. More hardy. Tougher skins. Less yield.
Yes but there were and still are wild, edible fruit and vegetables. Humans were hunter gatherers. We have always eaten whatever we could get a hold of. We’re omnivores for a reason.
Yes but they were not what we have today. Lower sugar content. More hardy. Tougher skins. Less yield.
The claim that was being refuted was that humans ate a diet that “pretty much only consisted of meat”. That is not the case despite the fact that our crops today are bred to be larger and more calorie dense. Humans did eat vegetable and fruit alongside meat in our ancient past.
Bananas grow on the trees.
Bananas grow on a herbaceous flowering plant.
Keep in mind that there is no such thing as a tree. They are tall and sturdy and woody and have a bunch of leaves on top, it is not unreasonable to call a banana plant a tree. Hell, the Wikipedia page for “Tree” goes back and forth on broader and narrower definitions and whether bananas and bamboo and so on count within them.
what I get from this comment is that trees are the crabs of the plant world
edit ~ oh, yes, that’s actually more or less the central idea of your link and the first comparison made. I’m still working on my morning coffee…
You have a false premise. Early humans did not eat primarily meat. It was a well balanced diet of about 65% animal products and 35% plant based. Source
Also, there was less specialization of roles, so people simply did more physical labor than people today, who sit at a desk 8hrs a day.
A healthy diet doesn’t matter more for being fit than exercise. You can eat as healthy as you want but if you don’t exercise you won’t grow muscles. A person mostly eating junk food but working out regularly will be stronger, faster, and better looking.
A healthy diet is important for longevity. And if can speed up your fitness journey but it will never replace what regular exercise does.
I mean meat is high on protein which is what you need to build muscle mass which is one of the requisites for being fit. Then running around all day chasing animals to eat them is gonna give you some really insane cardio, plus developed muscle from carrying around the prey and the hunting gear. So I have not idea what are you talking about, also pretty sure ancient humans already knew about edible plants and fungi.
I’ve never seen a photo of a fit caveman.
Pppsh. Everyone knows Encino Man is an accurate representation of a caveman body.
physical labor, it has nothing to do with meat (which you shouldn’t eat if you value your health or like dogs)
Meat isn’t poison, and in most cultures almost never comes from dogs. I’m a vegan myself, but your arguments sound ridiculous.
Beaides what others said about wild berrys and plants, keep in mind that the live expectancy was 30-40 while most people didn’t even survive until their 5th year of age.
Then how did people in the Bible live to be 900? /s
I mean, you gotta understand that we worked hard as fuck for our food. We ran that shit down for miles after miles and did lots of physical labor.
So, even if our diet was mostly meat, that didn’t mean we were unhealthy or fat. You can eat straight meat and be fit. You need the protein in the first place.
Humans can do that, but I would guess they more often tried trapping, fishing, and stealthy hunting? Running after an animal over long distances isn’t ideal. It’s a great way to get hurt, animals are very fast and you can lose the trail or they go where you can’t follow, and not to mention exhausting.
