229 Hunter-Gatherer Societies: Rethinking Our Ancestral Diet

# 229 Hunter-Gatherer Societies Studied: What if Our View of Human Diet Is Completely Reversed?

**by Laurent Glatz – for Athletic Carnivore**

For years, a very simple image of our ancestors has prevailed: a few pieces of meat when the hunt was successful, and mostly roots, fruits, seeds, tubers, and plants the rest of the time.

This portrayal seems so intuitive that it is now repeated as an unquestioned fact.

Yet, when we move beyond imagination and examine the available ethnographic data, the picture becomes far more unsettling.

An analysis published in *The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition* focused on **229 hunter-gatherer societies cataloged in the Ethnographic Atlas**, spread across vastly different environments worldwide. The result deserves close attention: **73% of these societies derived more than half of their subsistence from animal foods obtained through hunting and fishing.** Even more striking, **133 out of 229 societies, or 58%, obtained at least two-thirds of their subsistence from animal sources.**

However, caution is needed with a frequently misrepresented figure: it is not "68 to 73% animal foods." These are two distinct pieces of information.

A complementary analysis of these data estimates the **average dependence on animal foods at about 68%**, versus 32% for plant foods. The figure of **73%** refers to the proportion of societies studied where more than half of subsistence came from animals.

This distinction is important because it makes the result even more compelling.

It Was Not Just an Inuit Story

The immediate objection arises: of course, peoples living in the Arctic ate a lot of animals. They had almost nothing else.

That is true.

But the data do not concern only polar populations.

The researchers studied societies living in the **tundra, northern coniferous forests, temperate forests, mountainous regions, deserts, steppes, savannas, subtropical zones, and tropical forests**.

The environment greatly influenced the balance between plants, hunting, and fishing.

In the northern tundra regions studied, gathering represented on average only **6 to 15% of subsistence**, while hunting and fishing overwhelmingly dominated.

In northern coniferous forests, plant foods accounted for about **16 to 25%**, with fishing playing a major role.

In temperate grasslands, hunting alone could represent **56 to 65% of subsistence**, with fishing adding further contributions.

Conversely, societies living in desert, tropical, or vegetation-rich environments logically relied more heavily on gathering.

In other words, there was obviously no **universal ancestral diet**.

But something far more interesting emerges: when the environment allowed for substantial exploitation of animal resources, hunter-gatherers generally made extensive use of them.

The authors summarize their analysis by stating that, when ecological conditions permitted, animal foods frequently provided a very significant share of dietary energy.

73% Versus 13.5%: The Most Revealing Contrast

There is an even more revealing figure.

While **73% of the societies studied obtained more than half of their subsistence from animal sources**, only about **13.5% exceeded this same threshold with plant foods gathered from the wild.**

And when the researchers raised the threshold to at least two-thirds of subsistence, the difference becomes spectacular:

**133 societies out of 229** exceeded 66% dependence on animal foods.

Only **8 societies**, about 4%, surpassed this level with gathered plants.

This absolutely does not prove that humans are "obligate carnivores."

That is not the question.

It reveals something more subtle: **the idea that the historical human diet was primarily plant-based with occasional meat supplements fits poorly with this ethnographic foundation.**

But What Exactly Did These Populations Eat?

Another mistake must be avoided: automatically translating "animal foods" as modern beef steak.

Depending on the region, this could mean terrestrial mammals, game, fish, marine mammals, birds, eggs, shellfish, or other locally available animal resources.

Conversely, the plant fraction was not equivalent to our modern consumption of flour, refined cereals, fruit juices, or industrial products.

We are talking about wild plants, seasonal fruits, tubers, roots, nuts, and other resources whose availability, composition, and energy density could be radically different.

This is precisely why directly comparing a hunter-gatherer society to a modern Western diet simply by using the words "meat" and "plants" quickly becomes misleading.

A Highly Variable Diet… But Rarely What We Imagine

Another study estimated the carbohydrate intake of these same 229 dietary models. The range is enormous: depending on the ecosystem, the estimated carbohydrate contribution could range from about **3% to 50% of energy**, with a median and mode around **16 to 22%**.

This variability is essential.

The Hadza did not eat like Arctic populations.

Groups living in tropical forests did not eat like those in temperate plains.

Populations heavily dependent on fishing did not eat exactly like those primarily reliant on hunting.

A modern analysis covering several hunter-gatherer groups confirms this considerable diversity of food sources and reminds us that populations like the Hadza, San, Aché, or other tropical groups can present very different nutritional profiles.

What becomes difficult to defend, however, is the idea of a uniformly plant-rich and relatively animal-poor ancestral diet.

A Fascinating Study… But With Its Limits

We must be as rigorous with data supporting a hypothesis as with those contradicting it.

The Ethnographic Atlas obviously did not weigh every food consumed daily by 229 peoples.

It consists of ethnographic data classifying economic dependence on different subsistence sources within relatively broad intervals. The authors themselves and subsequent studies remind us that these estimates necessarily involve some approximation.

More detailed quantitative studies exist only for a much smaller number of societies.

But here is what becomes interesting: in a review of **13 quantitative dietary studies**, animal foods represented on average about **65% of energy**, versus 35% for plants. This result was relatively close to the average 68/32 estimate obtained with the 229 societies in the Atlas.

This does not turn the figures into universal truth.

It simply means that two different methods arrive at a fairly similar observation: **in many historically studied hunter-gatherer societies, animal foods were not a marginal supplement but a major component of the diet.**

And perhaps this is where this study becomes truly unsettling.

For a long time, the modern nutritional debate has sought to determine what humans "should" eat.

Anthropology first forces us to ask a much simpler question:

**What did we actually eat when our diet depended directly on our environment rather than nutritional guidelines and the food industry?**

The answer is not "only meat."

Nor is it "primarily plants."

It seems far more interesting: **a remarkable adaptability, with many societies studied showing a much greater dependence on animal foods than generally imagined.**

And this observation raises another question: when we apply today a carnivore, low carb, or more animal-rich diet, is it really our biology that poses a problem… or sometimes our modern way of applying it, our activity level, sleep, stress, metabolic history, and individual constitution?

This is precisely where statistics on 229 societies cease to be mere anthropological curiosity.

They remind us that a population can inform us about the possibilities of the human species, but it can never alone determine what suits an individual today. This is also the logic of Athletic Carnivore: using nutrition, low carb, sport, recovery, and other parameters as tools to read the terrain rather than as universal rules.

**So perhaps the real question is no longer: "Did humans eat meat?"**

The data make this question almost trivial.

The far more interesting question is:

**If our species could thrive in environments where 60, 70, 80% or more of subsistence sometimes came from animals, what does that change in how you interpret your own body's reactions today?**

**Understanding My Metabolic Terrain**

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