The Paleolithic diet, or caveman diet, a weight-loss craze in which people emulate the diet of plants and animals eaten by early humans during the Stone Age, gives modern calorie-counters great freedom because those ancestral diets likely differed substantially over time and space, according to researchers at Georgia State University and Kent State University.
Their findings are published in The Quarterly Review of Biology.
"Based on evidence that's been gathered over many decades, there's very little evidence that any early hominids had very specialized diets or there were specific food categories that seemed particularly important, with only a few possible exceptions," said Dr. Ken Sayers, a postdoctoral researcher at the Language Research Center of Georgia State. "Some earlier workers had suggested that the diets of bears and pigs--which have an omnivorous, eclectic feeding strategy that varies greatly based on local conditions--share much in common with those of our early ancestors. The data tend to support this view."
The co-author on the paper, Dr. C. Owen Lovejoy, is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Kent State University, well known for his reconstructions of the socioecology and locomotor behavior of early hominids such as "Ardi" (Ardipithecus ramidus, 4.4 million years old) and "Lucy" (Australopithecus afarensis, 3.2 million years old).
The study examines anatomical, paleoenvironmental and chemical evidence, as well as the feeding behavior of living animals. While early hominids were not great hunters, and their dentition was not great for exploiting many specific categories of plant food, they were most likely dietary "jacks-of-all-trades."
The review paper covers earliest hominid evolution, from about 6 to 1.6 million years ago. This touches on the beginning of the Paleolithic era, which spans from 2.6 million to roughly 10,000 years ago, but Sayers suggests that the conclusions hold in force for later human evolution as well.
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