Why were early humans so fit if their diet pretty much only consisted of meat?
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!
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.
Your source claims
Wood ... is also not a clear phyletic category.
However we all know wood is that which is scary.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The idea that plants are healthy is modern propaganda.
We have a gallbladder like other carnivores (and unlike any herbivore) and our cecum (appendix ) is vestigial, most people even have it removed. we can extract minimal nutritional value from plants because of this. Meat on the other hand is 100% bio available and is the reason we have large brains and small abdomens. we literally traded plants for brains.
Early humans where fit because the alternative was being eaten by a fucking wolf
That is not entirely true. The anthropological and archaeological evidence shows that humans have been omnivores since they first existed, the exceptions being cultures such as the Inuit that live in areas where plants are scarce, but even they eat some plants.
Note that it is true that once humans (really pre-humans) started eating more meat, they were able to extend their range as meat is a denser source of nutrients, but humans are still omnivores rather than obligate carnivores.
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.
Objective: Field studies of twentieth century hunter-gathers (HG) showed them to be generally free of the signs and symptoms of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Consequently, the characterization of HG diets may have important implications in designing therapeutic diets that reduce the risk for CVD in Westernized societies. Based upon limited ethnographic data (n=58 HG societies) and a single quantitative dietary study, it has been commonly inferred that gathered plant foods provided the dominant energy source in HG diets. Method and Results: In this review we have analyzed the 13 known quantitative dietary studies of HG and demonstrate that animal food actually provided the dominant (65%) energy source, while gathered plant foods comprised the remainder (35%). This data is consistent with a more recent, comprehensive review of the entire ethnographic data (n=229 HG societies) that showed the mean subsistence dependence upon gathered plant foods was 32%, whereas it was 68% for animal foods. Other evidence, including isotopic analyses of Paleolithic hominid collagen tissue, reductions in hominid gut size, low activity levels of certain enzymes, and optimal foraging data all point toward a long history of meat-based diets in our species. Because increasing meat consumption in Western diets is frequently associated with increased risk for CVD mortality, it is seemingly paradoxical that HG societies, who consume the majority of their energy from animal food, have been shown to be relatively free of the signs and symptoms of CVD. Conclusion: The high reliance upon animal-based foods would not have necessarily elicited unfavorable blood lipid profiles because of the hypolipidemic effects of high dietary protein (19–35% energy) and the relatively low level of dietary carbohydrate (22–40% energy). Although fat intake (28–58% energy) would have been similar to or higher than that found in Western diets, it is likely that important qualitative differences in fat intake, including relatively high levels of MUFA and PUFA and a lower ω-6/ω-3 fatty acid ratio, would have served to inhibit the development of CVD. Other dietary characteristics including high intakes of antioxidants, fiber, vitamins and phytochemicals along with a low salt intake may have operated synergistically with lifestyle characteristics (more exercise, less stress and no smoking) to further deter the development of CVD.
I don't think it did. From memory, biological anthropologists who study the diets of hunter-gatherer societies today, typically find it's about 30% meat, and goes through periods of scarcity.
It was probably similar.
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.
Check out https://www.amazon.com/Carnivore-Diet-Shawn-Baker/dp/162860350X and https://www.amazon.com/Carnivore-Code-Unlocking-Returning-Ancestral/dp/035846997X/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?crid=1MAORNKKPSQCA&keywords=carnivore+book&qid=1686982290&sprefix=carnivore+book%2Caps%2C203&sr=8-3.
All nutritionists you need are in animal products and people who exclusively eat them are thriving.
Check out https://www.amazon.com/Carnivore-Diet-Shawn-Baker/dp/162860350X and https://www.amazon.com/Carnivore-Code-Unlocking-Returning-Ancestral/dp/035846997X/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?crid=1MAORNKKPSQCA&keywords=carnivore+book&qid=1686982290&sprefix=carnivore+book%2Caps%2C203&sr=8-3.
All nutritionists you need are in animal products and people who exclusively eat them are thriving.
Check out https://www.amazon.com/Carnivore-Diet-Shawn-Baker/dp/162860350X and https://www.amazon.com/Carnivore-Code-Unlocking-Returning-Ancestral/dp/035846997X/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?crid=1MAORNKKPSQCA&keywords=carnivore+book&qid=1686982290&sprefix=carnivore+book%2Caps%2C203&sr=8-3.
All nutritionists you need are in animal products and people who exclusively eat them are thriving.
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.
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