I’ve covered a lot of ground in the previous parts of this series (I’ve been writing this for almost 6 months now) but I never got around to covering what foods have humans evolved to eat.
In this part and the next few (it always takes more than my original estimation), I’m going to answer the question that has the panties of so many online influencers tied up:
What is the natural human diet?
The vegans say that we evolved to be plant eaters. They say we lack sharp canine teeth, have long intestines, and other markers of herbivores.
The carnivores say that we evolved away from eating plants and are meant to only eat meat. They say when you eat meat, you are naturally lean, get enough protein, get high quality protein, etc. so it’s only obvious that we should be carnivore.
Then there is the vast majority of humanity that eats both plants and meat but they are usually overweight and unfit, so we cannot take them seriously. The vegans say they are unhealthy because they eat meat, and the carnivores say that they are unhealthy because they eat carbohydrates.
So what’s the right answer? We have to start from the beginning.
How Evolution Works
Modern humans are the most intelligent species that still inhabit Planet Earth. We evolved from our ancestral apes.
Our ancestral apes evolved from something else, that evolved from something else, that evolved from something else (you reach our fish like ancestors at some point – yes fish!), until we get down to us evolving from micro-organisms.
It took a long time for us to evolve from the very first proto-life forms but that does not mean that evolution scrapped all the useful things it got along the way.
This is something I discussed when I was talking about the human hypothalamus when discussing constrained energy expenditure. Many changes that evolution brings that are useful to a species are usually useful to the species that comes after it.
Evolution does not throw everything away and start from scratch. There are many many things that are extremely useful to us today that evolved long before humans, our ancestral apes, whatever came before them, and even the fish like ancestors even that.
I mean things like using ATP for energy, using oxygen to break down glucose, sexual reproduction, mitochondria, etc. We do not throw these away simply because “the species changed”.
There are MANY things about us that are extremely ancient. For example, the vertebra (backbone) we have came from long before apes even evolved.
At the same time there are many evolutionary traits we do throw away over time as they are not advantageous for the species’ environment.
The reasons for losing some traits are clear. For example, we lost the ability to breathe underwater that our fish like ancestors (probably) had because we didn’t live in water anymore.
For others, we don’t actually know the reasons why we lost them. For example, at some point in our evolutionary chain, we lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C.
Most mammals can make vitamin C (ascorbate) from glucose, but anthropoid primates (including humans) have a broken version of the gene for the final enzyme, so we need to rely on our diet for getting vitamin C.
Why did this happen? We don’t know for sure but there are many theories (which are out of the scope of this series).
My overall point is that we inherit the “lessons” of many millions of years of evolution but it’s a messy process and many things we inherit were actually developed by organisms that lived in very different environments than us. We just kept those traits around because they are useful.
At the same time, for all the traits we carry, we also bear the disadvantages of those traits because they exist in an environment they didn’t originally evolve for.
There are constraints and trade offs.
For example your backbone did not originally evolve for bipedal use. This is why all human backs degrade over time and we have to deal with back pain. Yes we did evolve modifications to our backs to make them better suitable for bipedal use (eg. lumbar lordosis), but there’s only so much that can be done.
Another is that our eyes did not originally evolve to be outside water so we have to blink all our lives to keep them wet and keep debris out.
These are practical constraints of evolution – it can only work with what it’s got.
There are many trade offs we made as well in our evolutionary journey.
We have big brains that make us more intelligent than everything else around us AND we are bipedal which necessitates our pelvis to be smaller. These big brains consume a lot of energy and combined with the smaller pelvis, makes the process of childbirth very messy.
Compared to other animals, all human children are born with significantly less developed brains and bodies otherwise our heads wouldn’t fit through our mom’s pelvis. This is why we aren’t walking 10 minutes after birth like many other mammal species.
The Evolution of Humans
If you went to school, you’re probably seen this:
This depiction of humans is useful for the basics but like the depiction of the atom with electrons revolving around the nucleus like planets around the sun, it is quite oversimplified.
The true story of human evolution is much more complex. There were many species competing with Homo sapiens that died out over time.
Some like the especially Neanderthals are even sometimes theorized/speculated to be smarter than us (they had bigger brains) and stronger than us but they lived in smaller groups and couldn’t compete with our bigger Homo sapiens tribes/social networks/connections (this is out of the scope of this series).
Let us look at a more detailed chart of human evolution from the common ancestor we had before the line split into gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos.
You evolved to eat plants
Early primates are thought to be squirrel sized animals that made their homes in trees. They primarily ate plants (and also insects) and had already evolved to like foods with higher caloric values (they inherited these adaptations from previous species).
We know gorillas are mostly vegetarian (herbivores, although they do eat some animal foods like insects). Chimpanzees and bonobos also have the ability to digest plants. Humans can also digest plants (with reduced abilities – see below). Putting it together means that our last common ancestor probably had the ability to digest plants.
The ability to eat and digest plant foods is ancient and was preserved (with some losses – read below) all the way down to us because it is so useful. Plants are a stable and predictable source of nutrition in the wild.
Hunter gatherers today still get a large percentage of their calories from things like wild tubers.
Agriculture is a very recent phenomenon on the evolutionary scale (civilization is only a few thousand years old), and hunter-gatherers lived in an environment of food scarcity for millions of years.
NONE OF THEM were saying no to eating plants.
Fun fact: Humans were baking bread even before we had agriculture. They were baking it from wild grain. We know this because we’ve found bread like remains and tools used to bake bread dated to 14,400 years ago i.e. thousands of years before agriculture.
Seven radiocarbon dates of short-lived charred plant remains from within the fireplaces indicate their use around 14.4–14.2 ka cal BP, which corresponds with the early Natufian period.
Systematic sampling and analyses of the full content of the fireplaces revealed an extraordinary archaeobotanical assemblage, with more than 65,000 well-preserved nonwoody plant macroremains belonging to at least 95 taxa. From these, club-rush tubers (Bolboschoenus glaucus) were most common and comprised approximately 50,000 remains. Other plants preserved in the fireplaces included crucifers (Cruciferae), small-seeded legumes (Trigonella/Astragalus), as well wild einkorn wheat (Triticum boeoticum/urartu), barley (Hordeum spontaneum), and oat (Avena sp.). In addition to these, the assemblage comprised at least 642 macroscopic (>2 mm) lumps of charred food remains.
The only groups that didn’t eat plants were the ones who had little access to them. If your tribe was around the Arctic where there was little vegetation, you were eating a primarily carnivorous diet but not by choice (even these Arctic Inuit tribes were eating some local plants and berries).
These groups are exceptions to the rule. Only a small number of humans ever lived in places where plants were not available. The vast majority of humans ate plants.
However we did lose some of our ability to digest plant foods in our evolutionary process.
Gorillas and many other species in the picture above can digest grass and thick leaves. These are built from cellulose (plant cell walls) and to break cellulose down, you need cellulase enzymes in your digestive tract.
Humans do not produce these. Neither do gorillas and nor last common ancestor. Or mammals in general.
What they do have is a fermentation system (a long large intestine with the right microbes) that helps them turn foods made of tough cellulose into absorbable nutrients.
Why did our line of evolution lose the ability to ferment leaves and grass?
Following Our Evolutionary Chain From Ancient Apes to Hunter Gatherers
We know that the earliest hominins did eat insects as a source of protein and may even have hunted small game when they could but their diet was still overwhelmingly herbivorous. We know this from analyzing the remains of their teeth and their feet bones (they were adapted to climbing trees).
But sometime around 7 to 3 million years ago, things started to change.
Becoming Bipedal (More than 3 million years ago)
Prior to 3 million years ago, we know our line had already slowly developed the ability to be bipedal (it took millions of years) and were using some tools but the fossil records are quite poor and it’s hard to draw strong conclusions.
The species around these times were omnivores but mostly ate plant foods. They occasionally ate some meat if they got lucky.
Making and using tools and scavenging
Sometime around 2.5 to 2 million years ago, we start to see major changes again. This period marks the emergence of the very first species in our genus, Homo.
We have found rudimentary tools from prior periods (Lomekwi – 3.3 million years ago), but in this later period, we are not just using tools (eg. using stones to crack nuts), but we are even making our own tools. Stone tools start showing up in large numbers across fossil sites around this time period.
Fun fact: Our ancestral species used stone tools for millions of years before we ever did. We didn’t invent stone tools, we inherited them.
From this point onwards, meat was no longer a rare delicacy. It was a regular item in their diet.
Early Homo are thought to have consumed relatively high quantities of meat. Homo habilis ate meat by scavenging and stealing kills from smaller predators. Many animal fossils from this period show cut marks from stone tools.
Adding a steady supply of meat to our diet was a game changer. Because meat is so protein and nutrient rich, species evolved to seek it more and more.
Hunting
Several changes took place. We diverted energy away from our digestive system to our brains and legs. The first hunter-gathers show up in the form of Homo erectus.
“Just about that time, 2 million years ago, we see big shifts in the human fossil record of increase in brain size, increase in body size and hominins leaving Africa for Eurasia.
– Joseph Ferraro, an archaeologist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas
Fun fact: Our ancestral species were hunting and gathering for millions of years before we ever did. We didn’t invent the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, we inherited it.
You evolved to eat meat
Once we started hunting and eating meat, we never stopped. And meat changed us profoundly.
Meat, especially fatty meats, have a high number of calories per bite compared to any other foods available at that time.
This meant that less food was needed to meet your energy needs (you don’t need as complex of a digestive system), and that being smarter would allow you to hunt better and get even more meat.
Natural selection thus diverted energy away from our digestive system to our brains.
This process was even fueled by the mastery of fire. Cooking allows us to use less energy to digest food and get more energy out of our food. Cooking made us rely even less on our digestive tracts.
Our digestive tracts are 40% smaller and our livers are 10% smaller than today’s vegetarian great apes after adjusting for size.
Some of the energy we saved from having a smaller digestive tract was reinvested in your brain. Today our brain size is ~50% more than that of Homo erectus and ~100% more than that of Homo habilis.
It’s somewhere in this long process of going from a grass eater to a hunter gatherer that we lost our ability to ferment cellulose. We didn’t need to eat low calorie grass to sustain ourselves anymore, and keeping the heavy machinery around to digest it was a waste of energy.
Bigger and smarter brains allowed us to form complex societies and tribes where we work in groups and share resources.
Homo erectus is among the first to practice sexual division of labor.
Sharing food and resources meant that attempting to hunt bigger game made sense. The risk was higher but you got more meat.
More members participated and the meat was split in the group even to the members who didn’t hunt (usually women, who did the scavenging for plant foods).
I don’t want to digress too much, but the long story short is that we have evolved to eat meat and animal foods. We’ve been doing it since before the emergence of our genus, Homo.
It’s been in our line of evolution for millions of years and our bodies have been shaped by it.
Our teeth structure changed, we evolved the ability to sweat so we can hunt better (this is debated), our digestive systems became less herbivore-ish, etc.
Long Story Short: We Are Omnivores
With all this said, the conclusion that we arrive at is that we are omnivores. We have evolved to eat both plants and animals.
But not in the same way as other animals in the wild (you evolved to eat softer and higher nutrition food).
We have lost the ability to digest certain plant foods (cellulose) and parts of insects (who have strong exoskeletons made of chitin – this is debated because we do produce some chitin breaking enzymes). But we can eat most things like grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, tubers, etc.
We have the ability to eat soft animal foods like meat, milk, etc. but not the tough parts of them like bones, fur, feathers, hooves, tough connective tissues (these need to be cooked to soften them up), etc.
We’ve evolved to eat predominantly cooked food. We can eat raw foods, but we’re built for cooked foods (yes there are some exceptional populations that eat their food raw, but they are exceptions to the rule).
Why I even talked about this topic
Any school kid knows that we are omnivores. I didn’t need to cover this topic in this series but there has been much ado (especially online) about what the “right” human diet is.
There are many people who are vegans who argue that we’re not meant to eat animals, and carnivores that argue that we’re not meant to eat plant foods.
These guys are both wrong. We can eat both and live long and healthy lives. In fact, the overwhelming majority of hunter gatherers ate and eat from both food categories (I will cover the hunter gatherer diet in more detail in the next piece in this series).
The next time you see an influencer tell you that you should not eat plants or animals, just laugh at them. They are brainwashed idiots who are blind to reality. Just look around you… most fit and healthy people eat both food categories.
Don’t waste your time arguing with them. There’s no point in arguing with someone who thinks the laws of physics don’t apply to them and say things like “calories don’t matter to gain or lose weight” which is exactly as retarded as saying “money does not matter to get richer or poorer”.
They think that the only way to live a healthy life is to adopt their diet. They are the equivalent of extreme religious ideologues who think that not following their religion means you will rot in hell.
Whatever diet you’re eating, as long as you’re getting enough of all the nutrients in plenty and aren’t consuming anything that is hurting you (e.g. poisonous food, or anything you are allergic or intolerant to), you are fine.
If you can digest something without damaging yourself, you have evolved to eat it. Some humans can digest milk in adulthood and others can’t. The ones who can digest milk evolved for it, and the ones who can’t, didn’t.
It’s that simple. Nature does not care about the morality of killing animals. The same is true of your religion. Just because your religion says you can’t eat pork or beef or something else does not by itself mean the human body didn’t evolve to be able to digest those foods.
Morality has nothing to do with biology. Nature’s game is about getting enough absorbable nutrients in without killing yourself. If your diet does that, you don’t need to worry.
Coming up in this series
In the next few pieces, I’m going to talk about what hunter gatherers eat, what foods we shouldn’t eat because they hack our brains and turn us into addicts, how our food preferences develop, and how to manage our diet so we stay healthy and don’t become a victim of food engineers who design highly palatable foods that are easy to overeat.
I believe these topics are far more actionable and useful than worrying about your exact ratio of saturated and mono and poly unsaturated fat and the different types of saccharides. I plan to eventually cover those topics in this series too but they are all downstream to what you eat and how much you eat.
Thank you for reading. That’s all for this piece.
I’ll see you in the next one.
Your man,
Harsh Strongman
| Title |
|---|
![Traits Women Find Attractive (And How to Score Yourself) [PART 1: Physical Aspects]](https://lifemathmoney.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Traits-Women-Find-Attractive-1.jpg "Traits Women Find Attractive")
