Stone Age Diet

Not a lot is known about the culture of early man. We have a few clues here and there but very little of substance and mostly conjecture. It seems reasonable to conclude that early man operated in much the same way as uncivilized people we have encountered in the recent past.

There is a bit of a movement to return to the Stone-Age diet and I have some sympathy for it as modern man evolved eating a diet that is quite different to that of today. Evolution would have moulded an optimal human for a diet that was hunted and gathered from the wild. – the classic hunter/gatherer lifestyle.

This from Wikipedia:

Food sources of the hunter-gatherer humans of the Stone Age included both animals and plants that were part of the environment in which these humans lived. These humans liked animal organ meats, including the livers, kidneys and brains. They consumed little dairy product or carbohydrate-rich plant foods like legumes or cereal grains. They also ate leaves and roots.

For about a million years humans used flint tools that barely changed over that period of time. It seems amazing that humans were able to stay static for so long and I have often wondered why. Was there some radical alteration in human thinking that suddenly occurred and propelled humans into the world of inventiveness that we see today? How could a million years pass without any significant development at all?

It would appear also that the human population stayed fairly static during that time as well. Only with the advent of agriculture have humans been able to increase their numbers so dramatically. This is one of the most compelling arguments for agricultural diets.

My theory is that humans ate mostly meat during this time. It was a time when we were shedding instinctive responses and developing rational responses. Better ways were being slowly developed to catch and prepare animals for eating. Ironically the shedding of instincts also led to a long dark age of humanity.

This was the age of cannibalism and this may be the reason why the human population stayed static for so long.