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somenameformetoday at 6:36 AM1 replyview on HN

No idea where you're getting this from. The paleolithic was during an ice age full of big fatty game like sloths, mammoths, and so on. Some believe we hunted these animals to the point of extinction with a tiny population, which would imply a very high level, arguably unbelievably high, of consumption of meat. Even if we didn't hunt them to extinction we certainly did engage in relatively large scale hunting and consumption of vast quantities of them, which already largely falsifies your concept.

Meat only became more of a luxury in the agricultural age where we started squeezing more and more people into smaller and smaller regions which meant there was no longer enough to go around. So plebs got the carbs, and royalty got the protein. FWIW you can also see this in the groups that have ancient traditions dating back far into the past, like the various tribal groups in Russia, Mongolian nomads, etc. Meat, and many highly creative ways of preserving it [1], remain the majority of their diet. They probably don't date back to the paleo, but at least far back enough to falsify the claim that animal fats are even remotely novel.

[1] - https://www.rbth.com/russian-kitchen/334150-dish-kill-kopalk...


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adjejmxbdjdntoday at 1:51 PM

This is just not true.

In reality we have little to no idea what the proportion of meat to non meat humans ate at the time.

More realistically, different groups of humans ate different ratios of such foods.

There were almost certainly a pretty large group of humans, for example, who were basically frugivores.

You can simply look up Wikipedia and find all the references about our limited knowledge and the high likelihood that there was no single paleo diet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic

Ultimately, humans have been opportunistic omnivores capable of eating and surviving on whatever was most easily available, which is part of why they spread so successfully across the globe.

Trying to look at our history is a silly way to determine what is a good diet for humans today when we can scientifically examine humans today and identify what foods are healthier than others for them.

It’s like instead of noticing that drinking purified water has better outcomes for human beings today, insisting that we shouldn’t live drink untreated water straight out of streams and lakes because that’s what our Paleolithic ancestors did.

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