OK, I see where you are getting your information-probably from Cordain, et al. There seems to be some dissention in the recent literature about how much recent hunter-gatherers can really be used as an analogy for our ancestral diets and how much plant based foods make up ancestral and some H-G diets. Having debate in human evolution is not abnormal-in fact, we argue about everything, The 80% figure i tossed out based upon my recall of class is too high, but there are some papers that still put the contribution fairly high. Just a couple of articles to show you the debate on the plant side.
K Milton, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition:
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/71/3/665
Hunter-gatherer societies in other environments were doubtless eating very different diets, depending on the season and types of resources available. Hayden (
3) stated that hunter-gatherers such as the
!Kung might live in conditions close to the "ideal" hunting and gathering environment. What do the !Kung eat? Animal foods are estimated to contribute 33% and plant foods 67% of their daily energy intakes (1). Fifty percent (by wt) of their plant-based diet comes from the mongongo nut, which is available throughout the year in massive quantities (
1). Similarly, the hunter-gatherer Hazda of Tanzania consume "the bulk of their diet" as wild plants, although they live in an area with an exceptional abundance of game animals and refer to themselves as hunters (
18). In the average collecting area of an Aka Pygmy group in the African rain forest, the permanent wild tuber biomass is >4545 kg (>5 tons) (
19).
The council on nutrition, which is not a peer reviewed article, but has a synthesis of studies presented. Since it is in pdf, I cannot copy and paste. I am sorry. But one of their points, that I agree with is that percentage of plant to animal based foods depends on geography, climate and season of the year. Trying to come up with a generalized diet that all humans ate is almost impossible once we left Africa and spread out over Europe and Asia almost 2 million years ago.
http://www.councilonnutrition.com/store/ancestor.pdf
From
http://www.cast.uark.edu/local/icae...in/conklin.html
HOMINID NUTRITIONAL ECOLOGY
As a prerequisite to considering the Australopithecus diet, we will briefly discuss hunter-gatherer diets, modern but traditional human diets, and the minimum nutrient requirements of humans.
Modern humans do not have high protein or fat requirements, as already mentioned. The value of 9.5% CP in the chimpanzee diet in our study is consistent with the prediction by Oftedal (1990) that all primates should have relatively low protein requirements because they have slow growth rates compared to other mammals (Case, 1978). Although a need for protein or fat is often assumed to explain increasing amounts of hunting throughout hominid evolution, primates do not have metabolic demands for high levels of protein or fat.
Eaton et al. (1988) proposed an ancient hunter-gatherer diet in the book
The Paleolithic Prescription. We can now evaluate their hypothetical diet in the light of what we have just learned about the chimpanzee diet and with what is known of modern human nutrient needs.
The hunter-gatherer diet Eaton et al. proposed contained 35% meat and 65% (wild) plant foods. Table 3 presents the results of the Paleolithic Prescription model diet, with some additional calculations:
Table 3.
Attached below
The format of the third column, % of total grams consumed, is comparable to the way we have been reporting the chimpanzee diet. The protein intake is almost 4.5 times higher than required by humans, so we can not make meaningful comparisons there. The fat intake is also high compared to the chimpanzee diet and to that required by humans, even though the authors used nutrient values from wild game meat instead of domestic meat, so the fat intake is moderate compared to a modern human diet.
The fiber content is the interesting point for comparison. The content is about half of that in the chimpanzee diet. This results from 35% of the plant component being replaced by meat, in effect diluting the fiber content of the diet. We have seen that a wild herbivore diet, such as the chimpanzee in Kibale Forest, is high in fiber because wild foods are high in fiber (Table 1). In order to dilute that fiber level further, a new source of food must be found that is low in fiber. Meat is guaranteed to reduce the fiber content of a diet considerably and to be fairly easily digested.
Nevertheless, because wild vegetation is high in fiber, the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer diet was still assumed to contain 150 g of fiber from its 65% plant component, a huge intake by modern standards. Westernized diets normally include only 10-20 g of fiber per day (Johnson and Marlett, 1986; Georgiou and Arquitt, 1992), although the National Cancer Institute recommends 35 g (Bourquin et al., 1996). Consequently, it is useful to consider a traditional, nonwesternized modern diet from Zaire where the only domesticated component of the diet is cassava, a tuber very low in fiber (Pagezy, 1990). The rest of the diet is wild, either game or wild plant food (Table 4).
And of course, Neandertals ate meat like crazy and were very effective hunters, with almost no plant foods in their diet, at least in Europe. I haven't looked at what they ate in the Middle East.
Linear Mode
