Meatfluencers, as they are known, often characterize their regimens as “ancestral,” made up of the foods our ancient predecessors ate. If this is what our ancestors ate, they argue, then this is what the human body is supposed to consume. “If you align your diet and lifestyle with millions of years of human and hominid evolution,” [influencer Paul] Saladino says in another TikTok appearance, “that is how humans thrive.”
Studies of the remains of our forebears, as well as observations of living primates and modern-day hunter-gatherers, refute the idea that humans evolved to subsist primarily on animals. Meat did play a significant role in our evolution. Yet that doesn’t mean we’re meant to eat like lions.
Hunting and gathering produces so many calories, in fact, that people can afford to share them with other group members, including children, whose brains take longer to develop than in other species and who need more time to learn how to fend for themselves. A strict plant eater can’t do that, because although the number of calories one can get every day eating plants is very dependable, it might not be high enough to produce a surfeit of calories. A strict meat eater, on the other hand, will have long periods of famine between feasts that do not, on average, generate extra calories. But when we put those two things together, Pontzer observes, we generate a surplus. And that surplus, he surmises, is the variable that’s made energetically expensive human things such as large brains and extended childhood possible.
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