Posted on 01/07/2025 9:06:01 AM PST by Red Badger
The Caveman Diet, also known as the Paleo Diet, is a weight-loss craze where calorie-counters pick foods they think early humans may have eaten.
For most followers, this means a meat-heavy diet.
But a new study suggests that if you truly want to eat like a caveman, you should be steering clear of red meat.
Contrary to popular belief, researchers from Bar-Ilan University say that early humans were not solely focused on animal protein.
Instead, cavemen were mostly vegetarians whose diets featured plant-based foods including acorns, cereals, legumes, and aquatic plants.
'This discovery underscores the importance of plant foods in the evolution of our ancestors,' said Dr Hadar Ahituv, lead author of the study.
'We now understand that early hominids gathered a wide variety of plants year-round, which they processed using tools made from basalt.
'This discovery opens a new chapter in the study of early human diets and their profound connection to plant-based foods.'
Cavemen have long been portrayed as voracious meat eaters.
But in their new study, the team set out to understand what early humans truly ate.
The researchers focused on basalt tools found at an ancient settlement site near Gesher Benot Ya'akov.
This site, located on the shores of the ancient Hula Lake, includes over 20 layers of settlement, fossilised animal remains, and plant remnants.
During their analysis, the researchers discovered starch grains approximately 780,000 years old on the basalt tools.
'These include acorns, grass grains, water chestnuts, yellow water lily rhizomes, and legume seeds,' the researchers wrote in their study, published in PNAS.
According to the experts, this indicates that plants played a central role in the cave man diet.
As for why our ancient ancestors prioritised these foods, the researchers suggest that it may be linked to the evolution of the human brain.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
As I have often said, cave paintings were done by the cave WOMEN. They are the shopping lists of their era...................
Is a "mostly vegetarian" who eats meat a vegetarian? Nope. An omnivore.
The bride and I are certainly omnivores, to include adult beverages of various sorts, even though "scientists say" stuff. We enjoy meats as well, and yet we are not "paleo" anything....
It’s easy to see why cavemen didn’t eat a lot of meat...those big creatures were hard to catch and hard to kill. Add to that the whole fire issue for cooking.
Scavenging for nuts and berries all day every day forever is an activity that few men would adopt but women would, picking and talking, carrying their babies.
Men want to do fewer of bigger, more important actions, hunting and bringing in a generous portion of high quality food that satisfies everyone and wins admiration for the skills involved, while also offering chances of dangers and adventures and challenges to be overcome that lead to tales that need to be told, suits the male creature.
Not that hard to trap small animals. Some wouldn’t even need outsmarting, being attracted to the scent of food being prepped by humans. You can catch a seal fairly easily, just go for the slowest one in the crowd heading for the water. And there are fish in the water. In some streams you hardly need a line and bait. There’s also earthworms, they mostly don’t put up a fight.
It’s not all about big game.
If I were a primitive human watching, say, lions, it might cross my mind that to be scary strong, I should eat like one. They like meat.
For me, when I eat carbs, I get hungry in an hour! But meat satiates me for hours and hours.
“Scientists slam the Caveman Diet”
Got to keep their masters in Big Pharma happy...
BINGO!
I wonder when salt, or salty-ish minerals were discovered to be flavor enhancers for foods such roasted meats?
Our closest living relatives - chimps - are omnivores and relish meat when they can get it. Humans were (and are) far more efficient hunters than chimps, even armed with primitive tools - if you expect me to believe that early humans did not eat substantial amounts of meat, I don’t.
Maybe in the south...
Chimpanzees are also cannibalistic................
That phrase almost always precedes a massive load of bovine excrement.
When your job is to survive in that age, you have to seek food almost 24x7. At that, you’re bound to run into fruits, veg and nuts. And early hominids didn’t have to carve out time in their day to exercise. Survival was tough. Chasing down game is plenty good enough.
Approximately 8,000 years ago.
They probably did most of the trapping, too.
Also, carbs are addictive. Try doing without sugar. Some veggies are complex carbs...turns to sugar
We were opportunists. Whatever we could find, dig up, catch and kill, we ate.
That being said. I adopted that “paleo diet” and dropped near 40 lbs and have kept it off.
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