This is what gets me - plant foods are scarce even in temperate regions much of the year. Before agriculture, what did people eat during the late fall when the last of the fall greens and fruits had died off, until mid spring, when the early spring plants had produced something edible? Clearly, they ate animal products - nothing else would have been available, period.



Even after rudimentary food preservation methods were developed (mostly drying fruit, or keeping some root veggies or winter squashes in a place protected from freezing, such as a cave, or a root cellar), there was no way possible to preserve or store enough plant foods to survive from late fall to mid-spring - 5-7 servings daily of fruit? another 5-7 servings of vegetables? No way.



And that's not even going into the problems with eating grains or legumes that hadn't been properly processed to make them edible.


They had to rely on animal products that would be available year round, and what they were able to preserve was used more as a supplemental/survival food, for when the hunting/fishing didn't go well, because the sheer volume of plant foods that would have needed to be preserved or stored for each individual person to survive on only those foods for several months is well beyond what they could have possibly harvested.