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?
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.
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.
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.
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…
Your source claims
Wood … is also not a clear phyletic category.
However we all know wood is that which is scary.
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!
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.
I’ve never seen a photo of a fit caveman.
Pppsh. Everyone knows Encino Man is an accurate representation of a caveman body.
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.
Humanity’s main method of hunting was basically just “follow prey at a steady pace and let it tire itself out before we do”. So they pretty much did a hell of a lot of cardio.
Yup!
Cheetahs are the fastest land animal for top speed and almost all fours legged animal is de facto faster than us. But two things we can do best, being smart (noticing patterns, imagination and language) and walking, we do mind bogglingly better than our nearest competition.
Those two go together.
Opposable thumbs and the brain power to use hands evolved earlier in hominids. Our line of the ancestry kept getting smarter and smarter with brains that required more and more energy as our ancestors kept evolving. To feed their enormously powerful brain, the species needed to make the body as efficient as possible, which led to our feet changing to support bipedal locomotion, which enabled our long distance hiker superpower through more efficient energy usage compared to four legged walking, even though four can go much faster, and left our hands free to do whatever we want all the time. Our bodies lost almost all hair, and evolved to sweat excessively, which gave us the ability to keep cool while we literally walked large animals to death from hyperthermia, simply by walking after them until they dropped dead.
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.
Humans are believed to have risen the food chain due to our ability to sweat and endurance chase our prey the way other predators couldn’t. This concept is known as “persistence hunting” and basically involved chasing our prey at a slow but consistent rate until they exhausted themselves and we could catch them
Yes for sure, I’m aware of our unique advantage to hunt that way, it is cool. I just think during human history and development, whenever possible, hunters also employed their ingenuity to hunt smarter. Even animals try to reduce their risks of injury and avoid burning calories. They’ll stop a pursuit if it seems too hard or risky.
Humans became the top predators due to “persistence hunting” which literally involved running slower than the prey but for longer distances until the prey was exhausted.
Yup, that is my understanding. Constantly on the move, working hard, and eating lean meats since the animals were wild game not factory fattened.
fit? possibly - or not, art of fit healthy people sells better than art of average slovenly people. artists need to eat too.
fitness aside, our ancient hunter/gatherer ancestors didnt live very long - hunting/gathering for survival is not a task that engenders longevity, especially when you’re tens of thousands of years away from discovering metal.
and then when we discovered farming/animal husbandry, we started having issues with diseases & plague. the average lifespan didnt noticeably increase, despite there being less active threats (baring war and famine, of course).
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’m not exactly sure on the fitness standards. If you look at indigenous African tribes that still hunt baboon in the night they don’t look especially fit by today’s standards, kinda like average people really, although I’m sure they’re beasts on the endurance front and they can shoot a baboon off a tree in the darkness of night with a makeshift bow which is mad impressive.
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.
Do you mean they mostly ate “animals”? (“meat” is a modern supermarket product). And by “fit” do you mean “not dead”? And exactly which “early humans” are you talking about? “Animals” consist of meat, organs stomach contents, brain matter, bones, skin etc. If they ate all of those parts then they would likely be balanced enough, and they all would have craved and eaten whatever veges they could forage too, particularly in tropical regions where fruit would be abundant.
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 guess Darwin’s law, hominids were fit but what was their average life span? 25?
Meat and organs is an almost complete food source. You’ll get sufficient vitamin D with lots of sun. Throw in berries and eggs and other foraged items and it’s a very healthy diet.
This is my non-expert answer, but iirc, if the animals you’re eating are eating a well balanced diet, you can actually be mostly carnivorous. If anybody who actually knows what they’re talking about knows that I’m wrong, feel free to call me out.
Firstly, after consuming meat, they were not sitting in an AC room glued to their smartphones or laptops. They had natural cardio. Second, animal meat that we consume today, those are bred by us specifically for meat production. It ain’t healthy.
