[zkms]

I feel the author is a bit too quick to debunk/discount the weird extreme claims of the carnivore tradfluencer set and jumps into the opposite direction: there seems to be a consilience of evidence (not just archeological) establishing Paleolithic / pre-agricultural humans as hypercarnivores: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.24247

I'm totally in agreement that the "raw meat only" pseudo-traditionalist influencer stuff is absolute ahistorical LARP (the frightening doses of steroids certainly is disqualifying) but humans seem well adapted to hunting animals and digesting meat in ways that other primates just aren't (flagrant examples that come to mind are stomach pH and small intestine vs large intestine size, the linked paper has more). Of course, there indeed have been more recent adaptations to survive better on plants/grains/etc, i think spurred by megafauna becoming more scarce; but that's not really a counterexample for the thesis that prehistoric preagricultural humans ate a lot of meat (not uniquely meat of course!).

[lolinder]

TFA doesn't claim that early humans didn't eat meat, they claim that they ate everything. The key claim in the article is that the diversity of food is what is lacking in modern diets, rather than absence of any single large nutrient group. I see nothing in TFA's claims that are incompatible with humans hunting animals and digesting meat more than other primates.

Also, I would not take that paper at face value without a lot of other literature around it. Two out of three authors make money writing about the Paleo diet, and they're explicitly proposing a new interpretation of the evidence, it's not a literature review representing any kind of consensus.