The so-called ‘Paleo diet’ is becoming an increasingly trendy alimentary lifestyle. It is promoted by some nutritionists, dietitians, and personal trainers for its alleged benefits on health, weight loss, and muscle gain. The aim here is neither to criticize followers of this diet nor to point fingers at its promoters and treat them as charlatans. Indeed, some features of this diet have scientific fundamentals, which are to be mentioned further below. Yet, the “paleo” adjective added to the ‘diet’ noun interpels and raises interrogations as to its very meaning.

What is understood by the general public as “paleo diet”? Is this brand (it is protected as a trademark) accurate and scientifically relevant vis-à-vis historical and paleoanthropological inquiries on the way members of the Homo genus fed themselves and conducted their lives? These are the issues discussed here, shedding light on what history and paleoanthropology have to say in this matter.

The diet of the hunter-gatherer's ancestor: an overview

The Paleo diet was not invented by our prehistoric ancestors in the comfort of their caves by a moonless night around the fire, after the tribe triumphantly hunted, gigantic mammoths now roasting in a pit for the barbecue party. It was born somewhere during the 1930s or 1940s by American scientists in the serenity of their labs and promoted by nutritionists, food writers through mainstream media, and athletes who aimed at promoting a healthier way of life. The concept dates back to the late nineteenth century. Adrienne Rose Johnson was the person who conceptualized the idea that there was something like the Stone Age diet, superior to the contemporary world, already in the 1890s.

He was comforted in his thesis by Emmet Densmore and John Harvey Kellogg. Both were advocates of hygienism as a lifestyle. In the 1950s, this diet was further elaborated by Arnold de Vries in ‘Primitive Man and his Food’ (1952) and in the 1975 book The Stone Age Diet by American gastroenterologist Walter Voegtlin, who claimed that ‘primitive’ men were mainly flesh-eaters 10,000 years ago. More recently, Stanley Boyd Eaton, a radiologist, and Melvin Konner, an anthropologist, proposed that contemporary humans were identical, or at least similar, to their ancestors from a biological standpoint. Therefore, they had to consume pre-agricultural foods. Nowadays, it is a protected trademark owned by ‘health scientist’ Loren Cordain, and it is advertised with a rather impressive marketing firepower.

It is worth giving a general idea of what is thus meant by the concept of ‘Paleo Diet.’ In a few words, the promoters of this diet propose to go back to the primitive humans’ way of eating. According to specialists, the secret to recovering, or at least improving, one’s health lies in adopting the alimentary habits of the humans who lived during the Paleolithic. The premise is that humans began to spoil their food habits when they started to live the sedentary way of life of agriculturists. Thus, people took on to consume what the advertisers of the paleo diet see as the greatest evil; that is, carbohydrates in the form of processed grain. Therefore, paleodiet programs generally forbid the consumption of wheat products like pasta, bread, and, indeed, pastry. Instead, these programs prescribe almond flour and honey for so-called ‘Paleo Cakes’ and pastry.

This goes along with the advice to consume raw vegetables and a rather considerable amount of meat, especially red. This kind of diet is rather similar to the keto diet, as the latter abhors the consumption of carbohydrates to privilege that of fat and protein foods. Dairy is, however, excluded from the Paleo diet. This is one of the main differences from keto. Followers of this way of eating avoid cheese and yogurt. Moreover, the Paleo diet generally rejects legumes, like most other post-agricultural foods. As to vegetables, they can be included in the diet; exceptions are made of starch-rich potatoes and maize/corn, which are absolutely prohibited in the paleo diet.

The alleged effects should be miraculous: rapid and consequent weight loss, muscle gain, and lowered blood pressure are among the enviable effects. It is thus supposed to prevent the surge of cardiovascular pathologies and tumors—the main plagues of our time. Paleo Diet explicitly claims that “diet” to them means a way of eating that results in gains. Strength gains, health gains. The stuff that helps you feel forever capable of doing what you want to do …”

What diet? The varied ways of eating during the Paleolithic era

The idea that going back to the ways of eating of the primitive ancestors will make someone super healthy, super strong, and muscular is indeed a very attractive one. After all, rare are the people who do not desire a perfect body (and a perfect soul?). From the standpoint of cultural criticism, the concept of primitive man is nevertheless fraught with (neo)colonial clichés of a good savage male running in the wild to chase game and, for primitive females, gathering berries in the woods.

The premise of the paleo diet is that the ‘Stone Age’ humans were superior to us in health and physical power. Primitives were supposedly free from metabolic diseases because of the diet they consumed while running in the terrestrial heaven of a Hollywoodian nomadism. In effect, this kind of concept may tell us more about obsessions about diets in a country known for its widespread consumption of ‘junk’ or ultra-processed food than about the alimentary habits of humans from the times of Homo Erectus down to the early Neolithic.

Paleoanthropology is the science that studies hominins. It studies the morphology, genetics, and biology of the earliest specimens of the human species and their ancestors. This leads to a first simple question: who is the primitive or Stone Age man the promoters of the paleo diet are talking about? How does their concept of man fit in paleoanthropological research, which has explained that there is not one but several human species that have lived and cohabited together over millions of years? This fact already complexifies the picture of Paleolithics. In a time span that stretches over millions of years, diets have tended to diversify according to evolution and the emergence of several species of hominins. Furthermore, what is known about diets depends on the remains of teeth and bones found by paleoanthropologists and the analysis of these fragments. Hence, let us focus on these two points: speciation and sources.

It could be tempting to think that the promoters of the paleo diet are right if one considers that an evolutionary leap was made with the separation of two branches of hominins: on the one hand, the Paranthropus and, on the other hand, the first representatives of the Homo genus, probably Homo Habilis. While the former specialized in consuming plants, the latter is known as a meat-eater. Most probably, the first Homo were carrion-eaters more than actual hunters. Even though the first Homo is our relative, they had stark biological differences.

After all, millions of years of evolution separate us from Habilis, Ergaster, and Erectus. Contrasts are not only cosmetic (skin colors and hairiness, for instance) but also genetic. For the present concern, it is important to stress that Habilis was an omnivore: his diet included tubers and wild grains as well as animal protein obtained from meat, but more often from marrow. The latter was the main source of protein and animal fats, which fed not only the muscles but principally this energy-consuming brain, whose structural growth eventually led to ours and the imagining of the diet of the Stone Age.

As the French paleoanthropologist and professor at the Collège de France Jean Jacques Hublin explained, Habilis, Erectus, and other hominins like Rudolfensis were rather opportunistic creatures. They ate what they found and could find. They were not the hunters (sometimes they even were prey) depicted by earlier images of the prehistoric men. There were periods of abundance, perhaps, but there also were long spans of starvation or at least scarcity. Analysis of bones has shown demineralization due to famine or starvation, and we may not know of other metabolic diseases, besides potential food intoxication provoked by germs and bacteria.

Certainly, the domestication of fire partly solved the latter issue, as well as eased the digestion of food. Eating cooked food reduced the time of digestion and favored the developmental growth of cognitive capacities, as the augmentation of the size of the brain. In the long, very long run, humans refined their skills at hunting but also kept diversifying their diet, which they adapted to the available sources of food allowed by the climatic conditions. Thus, there were places where humans gathered turtles and crocodiles, while in others, they had access to ungulate animals. The praise for mammals’ meat was more recent than it may seem.

As to meat in general, the best pieces were not necessarily those we appreciate today. It seems that for early sapiens and Neanderthals, offal was the most appreciated delicacy: after all, the liver is iron-rich and the brain is fatty. Recent research emphasized the consumption of cooked cereals not only by Sapiens but also by Neanderthals, thus questioning the idea that the ‘diet of the Stone Age’ was some kind of prehistoric keto diet. Tartar and dental plaque are evidence that cereals were part of the general diets of these humans.

Promoters of the paleo diet ought to admit what paleoanthropologists highlight through their research and analysis of sources. Sure, humans had less caries than the population since the Neolithic. Yet, their life expectancy was much shorter (and it continuously increases in many parts of the world), fraught with diseases and accidents. They lived a hard and harsh life of food insecurity, which followers of the paleo diet in the developed world may hardly be willing to live and able to survive.

To most people in the Western world, where this diet and others (keto, raw food) are advertised, it is unlikely that the food consumed by Habilis and Erectus, Neanderthals, and Sapiens would be edible at all. Neither would, moreover, be the kind of foods eaten by the inhabitants of early Neolithic settlements. The taste of food was considerably different, as animals and vegetables underwent substantial man-made transformation in the course of history.

The transformations of food: a bird’s eye view

There is one argument that one may agree with the advertisers of the paleo diet on. That is, the diet has experienced dramatic changes since the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic. Although it was an actual revolution? A revolution is a sudden change, a radical rupture with past habits and uses. Talking about the Neolithic and the sedentarization of Homo sapiens may lead to misunderstandings. Sapiens did not decide to become sedentary when waking up on the morning of a not very sunny day to take shelter from the rain and decided that it was time to work stones differently and till the earth to grow onions, carrots, and potatoes to cook in a casserole with pork, beef, or chicken.

In this view, homo sapiens thus would have taken on baking bread, refining flours, and bathing cakes in corn syrup to make ultra-transformed industrial cakes and high-sugar sodas. This overly simplistic narrative does not take into account, besides the data of paleoanthropology, the long-duration processes during which vegetables were selected and substantially transformed in various cultures across the globe.

Wheat is the by-product of the selection and domestication of spelled, probably by the Sumerians and neighboring populations. It was designed to have a higher yield of grains to make flour and semolina for brewing beer and baking bread. Were beers and breads introduced with agriculture, or was it the continued consumption of foods already consumed (in these times, beer was assimilable to food, as it is closely related to bread)? Indeed, it is generally thought that sedentarization was caused by agriculture, but it may rather be the contrary: sedentarized populations may have thought it wise to have permanent crops that would remedy food scarcity. Breeding and raising oxen (Bos taurus), mouflon/sheep, and Capra/goats, besides wild boars/hogs, red junglefowl (Gallus gallus)/roosters, hens, and chickens, was a solution to the sheer need for regular protein and animal fat intake.

Domestication of ungulate mammals provided dairy, a recurrent and somewhat economic source of fat, proteins, and calcium, as well as some vitamins. In many parts of the world, humans have not developed the necessary enzymes to digest dairy. They therefore rely on other sources of calcium, like fish bones in Vietnam. Yet, it can hardly be said that Vietnamese culture is pre-Neolithic. Indochina was the cradle of sophisticated civilizations, also neighboring the kingdoms of the Khmer and Siam (Thailand). More importantly, Vietnamese food culture was among those based on the cultivation of rice. If one thinks about moving toward Africa to find something that would relevantly resemble the paleo diet, the curtain of their illusion would vanish as they would see people consuming sorghum, millet, and rice, among other cereals.

Sorghum has been present in sub-Saharan diets for about 6 8000 years, whereas millet was domesticated in both China (10,000 years before present) and Northeastern Africa; it was consumed before having been cultivated during the “Green Sahara period” (7500-3000 B.C.). This latter fact points to the gradual transition to the Neolithic agrarian revolution. But, more essentially, it evidences that the ‘cereal-free’ or ‘carbohydrate-free’ dogma of the paleo diet is illusory and does not resist the confrontation with archeobotanical sources and historical facts. No doubt, carbs were different then. Yet, they were carbs nonetheless, and they were already part of the human diet during pre-agricultural times.

Harsh climatic conditions during the ice age did not make the same ingredients available to all. As said, the diet of older species of hominins than Sapiens was opportunistic, and so was that of our ancestors. The people whose exodus led to the Americas did not, before starting to consume and eventually grow them, have avocados and cherry tomatoes ready at hand to prepare tasty guacamoles with corn taco chips and chili sauce, nor did the proto-Celts have access to them. When people started eating carrots, this tuber was rather whitish or yellowish and probably had a bitter taste. It is to the Dutch that we owe the orange carrots. Cucumbers were hairy and not as refreshing as they are in a (modern) paleo salad that would include salmon (likely to be farmed and smoked).

The point is that there is no going back: the primordial varieties of vegetables, as well as most of the ancient stock of animals that were supposedly part of paleo diets, are now extinct, or if they exist, they are either not edible or difficult to access. The intake of supplements is interesting in that pills are nowhere to be found in the surrounding nature. These few facts, hitherto enumerated, do not do justice to the long, meandering history of human and hominin diets. Yet, they shed light on the enduring myth of a caveman who lived in the blessed prehistoric times in great health, possessed superior physical abilities, and had a simple mind. As said, this is an archetype of the colonial imaginary and has its roots in figures like Tarzan, for example.

Conclusion: the myth of the paleo diet in the age of spectacular capitalism

Should people follow a paleo diet? It may be safe to say “yes and no.” the paleoAfter all, freedom of choice is probably the legacy of the Modern Age, which we do not want to give up. Just like keto, some physicians prescribe it as a remedy for hypertension and diabetes. We, however, may expect them to be serious and have ethical concerns. If someone considers following the paleo diet, may they at least seriously consider the question of ‘What is the real paleolithic diet? Are all carbohydrates harmful to the body? Is it against my biological nature to eat them and dairy and a piece of cake once in a while? The fact is that we all tend, to a lesser or greater extent, to live in an acting representation of real life. Modern life, in contrast to the Paleolithic, is a show, a spectacle in which we produce ourselves on this scene in the theater of society.

The fact is that obsessions are cellmates to many of us. We are surrounded by commercials to try this or that diet in the hope of getting rid of superfluous kilograms and achieving outstanding performance to impress others (friends, partners, dates). The Paleo diet is arguably one of these programs whose success depends on people’s compulsivity and, therefore, weakness. Success is indeed ready at hand. An app on the smartphone is often all it takes to get at it. Or people believe so, at least. In this perspective, it may be good to pay attention to recommendations by Jean Jacques Hublin. Adopting a philosophy of living, not being obsessed with a particular diet.

References

The Strong and Healthy Diet.
Hublin, Jean-Jacques. Quand d'autres hommes peuplaient la Terre: Nouveaux regards sur nos origines. Flammarion, 2017.
Wrangham, Richard. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Basic Books, 2009.
Larsen, Clark Spencer. "The changing face of human nutrition." Scientific American, 2016.
France Inter - La Terre au Carré.
Épisode Episode: "Manger comme un homme préhistorique: mythe ou réalité?"
Discussion avec des experts sur les régimes paléolithiques.
The Naked Scientists - Neanderthal Gourmet- ‘Energetics of hominines’ seminar at the Collège de France, part 13, intervenant(s): Camille Daujeard, Institut de Paléontologie Humaine, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris.