Caveman Food

Obviously, there's no one answer to this question. Different cavemen lived in different parts of the world, and of course the diet varied throughout the season.

Although most cavemen lived more than 12,000 years ago, we do have some reasonable idea of what they ate, since in the not too distant past, anthropologists regularly encountered "stone-age tribes" that had never come in contact with modern civilization. The records of what these modern cavemen ate provide a pretty good insight into what their more ancient cousins ate.

One way to start is to list the foods that were not part of any caveman's diet. A rough approximation to Tom's diet can be achieved by avoiding the following foods. Tom's diet includes some of these, however:

• Potatoes (less than 11,000 years old)
• Cereal grains (rice, wheat, barley, corn)
• Dairy products
• Refined sugar products
• Most alcohol; especially distilled
• Modern fruits bred for high sugar content
• Large amounts of salt (at least for those not living near the sea)
• Foods that require cooking (the caveman did not have any mechanism for boiling beans for 2 hours, for example)

Probably the main difference between what we eat and what the cavemen ate is that the cavemen ate a greater variety of foods. This has a couple of advantages:

• If there's something unhealthy about a particular food, he would tend to eat less of it.
• Eating a wide variety of foods would make it more likely that he'd encounter, at least in some of them, trace vitamins and minerals that his body needed.

So finally, here is a list of some general types of foods that would have been common components of the diets of the cavemen:

• The diet was probably higher in protein than what we eat, since carbohydrates are so easy for us to encounter (rice, potatoes, bread, pasta, sweets, et cetera). The animals he was able to catch had a higher ratio of protein to fat in their flesh, since they were like today's "game animals", not corn-fed beef.
• Although the meat was lean, the caveman was able to obtain more fat than you'd think, since he ate much more of the animal, including the organs, bone marrow, tongue, eyeballs, which are higher in fat than muscle, and in addition, a fair amount is available as mesenteric (gut) fat. The fat from these sources, however, is less saturated than the marbled fat you find in the high-priced cuts of beef today.
• Cavemen living near the seashore or waterways where fresh-water fish were available similarly would find themselves eating a high protein to fat ratio.
• In season, fruits and berries were available. Keep in mind, however, that breeding of fruit that has produced today's very sweet oranges, apples, et cetera, had not occurred, so the caveman fruits had considerably less sugar that what you'd find in today's fruit market.
• Some grass seeds were eaten, many of which were probably the precursors to today's cereal grains, but the amounts were miniscule compared to what most people eat today.
• Nuts were a good source of protein and fat.
• Roots, like yams and sweet potatoes were available in some places.
• Root vegetables, like carrots, turnips, parsnips and rutabagas were available.
• For all the vegetables mentioned above, there was a high percentage of dietary fiber.
• Sometimes it was easy to obtain eggs.
• Some of the braver cavemen got to eat honey from time to time.

Now that we know roughly what our ancestors ate, we can use that information to make some reasonable approximations to what we should eat if we want to emulate their diet.

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