- For some prehistoric people in the Andes, a paleo diet meant eating lots of plants.
- According to one study, 80% of an animal's diet may consist of plants.
- One of the experts said that in ancient times there were as many types of diet as there was a population at that time.
The popular Paleo diet is based on the belief that we are better off eating like our ancestors and eating a diet rich in meat.
But new research suggests that some of our ancestors didn't eat meat at all, instead opting for a mostly plant-based diet.
"The conventional wisdom is that the early human economy was based on hunting, and that idea led to a number of fads in high-protein eating, such as the Paleo diet," said Randy Haas, associate professor of anthropology. Wyoming, who led the study. is reading . He said this in his statement.
He added: "Our analysis shows that 80% of the diet consists of plant materials and 20% is meat."
A study published Wednesday examined the remains of ancient humans buried in the Peruvian Andes about 9,000 years ago.
Herman Pontzer, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, told Business Insider that this adds to a body of evidence that prehistoric diets were incredibly diverse, from high-meat to low-meat foods.
"One way to think about it is that as soon as someone tells you they have a paleo diet, you can stop listening," said Pontzer, who was not involved in the study.
what are you eating
Looking at anthropology, it's easy to think that people always love a good barbecue.
"Animal bones are generally better preserved, more abundant and easier to find in archaeological sites," archaeobotanist Seren Kabuko, who studies ancient diets at the University of Liverpool, told BI.
The same applies to sharp stone and bone tools used in hunting.
This so-called conservation bias has led some prominent researchers to believe that Paleolithic humans preferred hunting over gathering.
But the advent of more modern analytical methods, especially mass spectrometry, has changed the situation. For example, scientists can now tell what people ate at the time based on the types of atoms or isotopes stored in human bones, such as nitrogen.
"When you eat protein, you're eating nitrogen, and all the nitrogen in the world tastes different," Pontzer said.
"If you're eating something at the top of the food chain, you're still adding that particular type of nitrogen," he said. This isotope binds to bones as they grow and can be detected by scientists thousands of years later.
Haas and his colleagues performed such analyzes on the bones of 24 individuals from the Welamaya Batjxa and Soro Micaia Batjxa populations in Peru.
They were a nomadic hunter-gatherer group that lived about 4 kilometers above sea level between 9,000 and 6,500 years ago. At the time, agriculture and the farm economy didn't exist yet, "at least not to the extent that we know it today," Haas said. BI has released information about this by e-mail.
For a long time, it was believed that this group consisted mainly of predators. But a study published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE by Haas and colleagues found that they consume between 70 and 95 percent plant matter in their diets.
Tubers, relatives of today's potatoes, probably made up a large part of their diet.
"I was surprised by the result: About 80% of the diet of the first explorers in the Andes was vegetarian," Haas said.
"Then it turned out I was completely wrong about the story and there's a good explanation for why it happened (conservation bias)," he said.
There is no one-size-fits-all Paleo diet.
This isn't the only study that refutes the model often presented by proponents of the modern definition of the paleo diet.
Paleo traditionalists support a definition popularized by exercise physiologist Lauren Cordain in the early 2000s, who encouraged people to adopt a high-meat, low-carb diet to mimic their ancestors.
Since then, people have come up with variations of this idea, such as the vegan diet, which is a combination of the paleo diet and the vegan diet.
These diets may help you individually, but anthropological evidence suggests they won't work, Pontzer said.
"It gets weird when you start telling stories from the past to support particularly radical ideas about what we should eat," he said.
One thing is clear: a diet rich in meat does not reflect what people ate thousands of years ago.
Instead, prehistoric humans resorted to whatever was available, almost always relying on a healthy combination of hunting and gathering.
"The meeting is valid. You always come home with something," Bunsen said.
Some populations, such as Arctic peoples, may have relied on big game for their diet, said Pontzer, who also wrote the book "The Burn" covering the topic.
But other groups, such as early populations in Australia and South America, primarily consumed plants. Many fell somewhere in the middle.
Early humans or their immediate ancestors didn't necessarily avoid starchy foods, Pontzer said. For example, one study found that Neanderthals ate a lot of starchy carbohydrates.
These diets changed depending on the season or when resources were depleted.
As research methods become more sophisticated, we can learn more about our ancestors' diets by revising existing data, Haas said.
"What we've seen is that people ate a wide variety of diets and did well on all types of diets," Pontzer said.
"Stay on your diet," Pontzer said. "But I wish there was less of this revisionist history to support our food choices, because there's very little evidence for it."
