WHAT OUR ANCESTORS ACTUALLY ATE

Our hunter-gatherer forebears weren't the carnivorous cavemen we once thought. Which makes trying to build a diet based on what they ate not only unwise, but practically impossible

- HATTY WILLMOTH

Imagine doing your entire food shop at a butcher's. No vegetables, no bread, no fruit, no pasta, milk or biscuits - just a trolley full of meat, fish, eggs and lard.

That's the carnivore diet. Its gospel has been preached all over the internet - by fitness influencer Brian Johnson (aka Liver King), Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and podcaster Joe Rogan (who said the diet gave him "sporadic bouts of hellacious projectile doodoo").

But despite such vivid imagery, the carnivore cult is growing. Data from Google Trends shows that searches for the term "carnivore diet" roughly tripled in the UK and US from 2022 to 2025, and there are now more than 160 carnivore cookbooks listed for sale on Amazon.

There's no real science proving the diet is beneficial, but many meat munchers feel confident in their choice because they think our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate mainly (or only) animals. The carnivore diet, they say, is a better fit for our biology than a modern diet of carbohydrates, processed foods and farmed plants. It's what we evolved to eat.

But here's the thing: there's a limit to what The Flintstones can teach us about nutrition. What people imagine to be 'ancestral' eating is not only inaccurate, but often unhealthy. And any lessons we can learn from our Stone Age predecessors are nothing like what the podcast bros would have you believe.

'MAN THE HUNTER'

The first thing to note is that our ancestors weren't actually carnivores. That's a misplaced narrative based on outdated archaeology.

Dr Emma Pomeroy is an Associate Professor in the Evolution of Health, Diet and Disease at the University of Cambridge. She says: “We have this idea of cavemen — and it usually is men — eating a very high meat diet and not relying on anything else. For most humans, that wasn’t the case.”