Your Ancestors Ate Bugs — The Paleo Diet Is Completely Wrong

The modern "paleo diet" promises you'll eat the way your ancestors did. Your ancestor in Greenland is eating raw whale liver. Your ancestor in Tanzania is eating mostly plants and honey. Your ancestor in Australia is eating a fat white grub. None of them are eating chicken and broccoli out of a meal-prep container.

The Paleolithic period spans roughly 2.6 million years ago to ~11,700 years ago — across every continent, every climate, every season. Asking "what did Paleolithic humans eat" is like walking into a global Whole Foods and asking "what's for dinner."

Real ethnographic data on hunter-gatherer groups shows wild variation: the traditional Inuit diet was roughly 90-99% animal foods (with vitamin C from raw or lightly cooked meat and organs); the Hadza of Tanzania get the majority of their daily calories from plant foods and honey, with honey alone supplying about 15-20% of total calories; Pacific Northwest tribes relied heavily on salmon but balanced it with marine mammal fat, shellfish, berries, and roots; Amazonian groups have long depended on cassava — a tuber so toxic it requires days of grinding, soaking, and cooking before it's safe.

Many groups also ate wild legumes thousands of years before agriculture — directly contradicting the modern "paleo" prohibition on legumes.

The "Paleolithic diet" as a branded modern movement began with Walter Voegtlin's 1975 book "The Stone Age Diet" and Eaton & Konner's 1985 NEJM paper "Paleolithic Nutrition," then got rebranded by the wellness industry into the rules you see on Instagram today. A 2017 review by Crittenden and Schnorr in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology Yearbook emphasized that hunter-gatherer diets are characterized by DIVERSITY, not by any specific macronutrient ratio.

What actually holds up across most hunter-gatherer populations: way more fiber (Hadza ~100g/day vs Western average ~10-15g/day), a wider variety of plant species (50-80 per group vs ~12 in Western diets), minimal refined sugar, and no industrial seed oil.

Sources
• Eaton & Konner (1985). Paleolithic Nutrition. New England Journal of Medicine 312, 283-289.
• Crittenden & Schnorr (2017). Current views on hunter-gatherer nutrition and the evolution of the human diet. American Journal of Physical Anthropology Yearbook 162, 84-109.
• Marlowe et al. (2014). Honey, Hadza, hunter-gatherers, and human evolution. Journal of Human Evolution 71, 119-128.
• Voegtlin (1975). The Stone Age Diet.
• Fediuk (2000). Vitamin C in the Inuit traditional food system.

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#paleo #anthropology #hunter-gatherers #diet #science #curiosity
This Curio explores the "paleolithic diet," contrasting its "eat like a caveman" philosophy with our current dietary habits. We examine the perceived impracticality of this diet plan and the common deviations from its strict rules, including a humorous look at modern ingredients. By diving into the world of nutrition, we highlight how the paleolithic diet often clashes with the realities of a modern diet, providing a critical diet review.

New Curio every Mon / Tue / Wed.

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