Crooked Timber has a great post on using what you think ancestral man ate to argue for various types of fad diets:
There seems to be about as much theorising relative to evidence in the discussion of what cavemen ate and did, as the ev psych crowd try to get away with about their family and political arrangements. Obviously, the suggestion that cavemen "didn't eat carbohydrates" can't be meant literally -- we would never have survived if this had been true. They ate fruit, seeds, roots and all sorts. I suspect that what's meant here is that cavemen didn't eat much starch because they hadn't domesticated grains. But that's not the same thing; they didn't eat grains because they hadn't got any, not because they had stomachs which couldn't digest starch. If you time travelled back to the Pleistocene and handed cavemen some cornbread, they would have eaten it.
In any case, if we're talking about cavemen here, nor had they domesticated animals. I am not going to pin this one on De Vany, because I don't know if he's guilty of this particular fallacy, but I've certainly met people who were on the Atkins Diet who made the claim that it was "natural" and "good for you" because "cavemen didn't grow wheat", and then sat down to tuck into an 18 ounce USDA Prime steak, a piece of food which could not possibly exist in a world in which there wasn't huge amounts of wheat and soybeans being grown to make animal feed. The meat component of a caveman's diet would have been much heavier in rabbits, small birds and rodents than it would in anything you can buy in a supermarket.
Read the whole thing.
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What do the people who study caveman coprolites think about this?
Cavemen? Cavemen?
The meat component of a caveman's diet would have been much heavier in rabbits, small birds and rodents
Except those things are bloody hard to catch (without a fairly sophisticated snare or trap technology), pretty poor nutritionally, and there's vast amounts of archaeological evidence for extensive and sophisticated big game hunting. Heavier in shellfish, sure. (Exactly which period are we talking here anyway? Palaeolithic, I presume, since we had domestic animals in the Mesolithic and cultivated grain in the Neolithic. But when in the Palaeolithic? And where?)
I would bet modern dollars to prehistoric doughnuts that the majority of the exercise in a caveman's life came from chopping firewood and carrying water.
With what and in what, if we're talking early-to-mid Palaeolithic? Lots of ready-to-use firewood just lying around, and nobody's invented watertight containers of a practical size yet (that I know of). If you don't have a good cutting tool, you "chop" as little as possible and use fire to do the rest. And you live as near to a water source as possible, because you simply don't have the technology to carry significant amounts of water any distance.
Anyway, I say again: cavemen? Caves are lousy to live in, and poorly distributed. Huts and other shelters are much more comfortable and relatively easy to build, they just don't survive very well in the archaeological record. It is unlikely that caves were ever the main form of shelter for most people.
Sure, using bullshit ideas about the diet and lifestyle of early man to support your fad diet is bad. Equally, using bullshit ideas about the diet and lifestyle of early man to refute other people's bullshit about the diet and lifestyle of early man is also bad.
Never mind coprolites, we have middens. In my part of the world they're chock full of shells (mostly limpets and razors) and large animal bones (such as auroch and red deer, but also many marine mammals) - although as I'm in the UK, this is mostly post-glacial, and hence Mesolithic or later.
Judging by my experience on the Inst. of Arch's 'Primtech' (many years ago), the chief diet of the Paleolithic would seem to be blackened yet raw sausages and crisps bought from the local pub, plus the occasional (and highly prized) Mars bar. No wonder some of us escaped to civilisation...
You DO watch ethnic food, Jake! 8 ^ D