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?
Do we actually know that early humans were fit? A couple of big things to consider are that we mostly see depictions of early humans made by marketing teams trying to get people to go to their museum, or see their movie, or eat their new fad diet. That’s not likely to be realistic. And that natural selection would have culled the weak, slow, and otherwise deficient. If we picked a sub-population of humanity right now that would be similar to the humans of the past that survived to 30, most of us would not be in that group. Furthermore, it is absolutely possible that all of the humans in a given region were malnourished because they didn’t have access to a varied diet. They might likely die out and be later replaced by humans that had learned to grow crops, bring cattle, or otherwise provide for the deficiencies in diet that the surrounding area couldn’t give them.
I think it’s important to realize that almost everyone is plenty healthy at 30 years old assuming they haven’t grown enormously fat. Health decline is a more recent issue as people have lived long enough for organ failure/cancer to take over as the leading cause of death instead of malnourishment/injury.
A huge problem was teeth. Eating those old hard seeds and fruits plus grinding down greens wore away teeth. Once the teeth are gone, wild animals quickly suffer malnourishment and early humans would have had the same issue. Living to a ripe old age would require soft food, plentiful access to it, and not dying to infection. Only then would long term health be a real concern for our ancient ancestor.
I fully support the notion of thicc cavepeoples.