I say this because the only reason I see being vegan is somewhat healthy nowadays is because of supplements and fortified foods. But I wonder, would it have been possible in our ancient history?
For my area - nope. Too cold in winters, not many major plant based protein sources (mushrooms and pine nuts were native, buckwheat and peas were introduced later with international trade but that’s mostly it). People were building cities on the rivers and fish was an essential part of the diet.
Also, international fur and honey/wax trade were essential to the economical system of the state, so it influenced the lives of the people greatly. It is not exactly about eating vegan, but from this point of view living vegan wouldn’t work so well.
But to be fair - most of the folks before about 100-150 years ago ate so poor that they could barely survive. So does it really matter?
There are several essential(meaning cannot be made by humans and must come from diet) nutrients only found in animals. B12 being the most obvious.
Depending on how ancient is ancient our ancestors could not have survived on a completely vegan diet.
Even primates which we share common ancestors with do not eat a vegan diet often eating bugs etc.
I don’t know why you’re getting shit on for this, OP. I think it’s an interesting question. I mean, they could have survived on plants/nuts/seeds that were high in protein, but I’m not quite sure. I’m certain SOME of our ancestors probably lived day to day without meat intake simply from just the lack of animals nearby?
I don’t have a source, but I read an article talking about how Jainists, who traditionally eat only vegan food, started getting sick with modern food storage. Turns out, they were unknowingly eating bugs with their flour, which gave them the B12 they needed to survive. Modern food storage kept the bugs out, which then made them sick.
So I’d say that ancient peoples wouldn’t have survived being actual vegans, but could survive if they accidentally ate bugs with their plants.
So many disinformed/delusional comments, just wow.
A 100% plant based diet was not possible in the past for several reasons, the most important one being the lack of B12 in plants. B12 deficiency sustained for several years becomes a fatal condition.
Ancient man wouldn’t have evolved from our primary cousins, and later evolved into us if not for meat, and the cooking of meat. There isn’t enough time in the day to chew the amount of grass/plants necessary to feed our massive, complex brains.
Depends on where in the world you’re talking about brah.
Native Americans in the SE around the Mississippi prolly WERE pretty close to Vegan, the three sisters way of planting is a good Google term for you there.
However, let’s move slightly to the great plains, where nothing grew, and they followed the Buffalo herds for sustainability.
Or we go to any of the coastal native Americans and they are all underweight and spend their days foraging for food like mussels, fish, etc. No real agriculture there.
Tbh, this a huge open question that needs many many caveats before someone could answer properly.
No, our ancestors didn’t have the luxury of choice for survival. The fact is, that ancient diet isn’t sustainable without destroying the planet but today we have the luxury of an alternative choice to help prevent it.
I’m not a scientist. Or a historian. But there wasn’t a single PURE vegan culture or civilization in all of human history until recent years. (hell, even modern vegans struggle to be 100% vegan.) We literally evolved to be who we are BECAUSE we started eating meat. Meat and fat provides tons of nutrients that plants simply can’t compare with unless you worked absolutely all day eating it. There’s a reason why we don’t have 4 chambered stomachs. We aren’t herbivores. We aren’t meant to eat just raw plant matter. In fact, the human body even struggles to eat raw food over cooked food because we evolved to eat food that has been broken down. When we eat raw, its more difficult for our stomachs to break down the cell walls of plants. This is why the raw diet is so popular for weight loss– your body quite literally spends more energy breaking down raw plants, and also doesn’t absorb a lot due to the fact that it can’t be completely broken down. Yes, some nutrients are actually lost by cooking like vitamin c. But some nutrients actually increase in effect because of cooking. Early humans ate soup, which absorbed all of the nutrients lost by cooking into the water.
Only the earliest of our species could’ve done this, as their bodies were evolved perfectly to eat such food. You can look at our primate cousins who are mainly vegetarian and go, “well they can do it!”.. but again, they evolved to do that. We are different.
But to answer your question- no. I don’t think they’d live very long. Especially as a VEGAN. Not a vegetarian. The amount of work just to survive, and then try to balance eating like 1000 calories worth of plants in a single day when you need at least 3 x that? Yeah, no.
If anyone disagrees, I’d love to hear it. I genuinely wonder how the hell humans would survive in the wild eating only vegetables and some fruit. Also take note that a lot of the “proteins” that vegans eat, are made from sources all around the planet. Early humans only had what was around them in their environment, not across seas. And surely no supplements of any kind.
As far as I’ve seen with research, no known intention vegan societies existed in older, hunter-gatherer or early agricultural societies. While Veganism may have existed in places like India for a while, but that i’d call fairly recent compared to the rest of Homo sapien existence. I believe one research thought they found one group living on some remote area of Papua NG, but then realized that they’d occasionally kill and eat folks from another tribe living on the coast (who ate fish and such from the sea). Even plant-eating herd animals will occasionally eat small animals or insects when they have the chance.
I would call veganism a very modern invention that is supported by modern agriculture and world distribution of goods.
The human brain never would have developed to where it is today without animal products.
Do not interchangeably use the word vegan and plant based. Vegan is an ethical standing, that by effect leads to a plant based diet. But not all plant based diets are vegan. Being vegan is about more than just diet.
However I fail to see how what worked for the human race tens of thousands of years ago has anything to do with the diets able to sustain a healthy lifestyle now.
Zero chance. Mayyyyyybe if they lived somewhere tropical with an abundance of fruits and veggies it’s possible but 10/10 times they’re still gonna eat fish and whatnot cause it’s dumb not to.
Watch the TV show Alone, in season 7 they have to survive 100 days in the Arctic and they spend basically every minute of the day trying to find meat to sustain energy.
Veganism is an option for humans only because civilization has evolved enough to make it possible.
You could try posting this question on r/askhistorians
Check out this post:
No. Because Veganism is a moral philosophy.
It works very well in 70% of our modern world and could easily be attained on the whole planet if Humans admitted that money is just a story we tell ourselves and we’ve outgrown the need for war.
But to your original point fasting is Vegan and the likelihood that tribes get meat everyday is low. But we still would have eaten grubs and insects etc.
Scientists have founds what appears to be fully vegetarian/basically vegan Human and Neanderthal burial sites thou but its impossible to know.
Appealing to nature or our answers to diet appeals to alot of people. I’ve always found it strange as the one consistent thing we knkw about our ancestors is most of them struggled daily for there entire existence. And tribes that are stable normally have nothing close to what a western nutritionists would refer to as optimal.
Most tribes eat on average 12 foods for their entire lives and die with a belly full of tape worm.
Humans can easily survive on any diet. That’s why we are winning.👊🤙
Food was different then. Fruits not as sweet or large. Mushrooms are a good source of protein. Aren’t our ape cousins vegetarian? Seriously… I’m not sure, but if they were then it seems plausible that we could have easily survived being vegetarian while evolving to our current form.
It depends how far back you go. At some point yes. Then about 3 million years ago they started eating a lot of meat and lost the capabilty to absorb the b12 their gut microbiom produced. Since then until the invention of B12 vitamin pills it wasnt possible to eat a vegan diet without health consequences.
I don’t think so. However, there wasn’t a necessity for veganism in ancient times. Most people are vegan today for either environmental or animal cruelty reasons, and climate change wasn’t an issue back then, neither was factory and cage farms.
No. They had to eat whatever was available to them, because whatever was available was often times barely enough to sustain a human. Famines were common. There’s a reason we evolved to eat damn near everything. Being picky reduced your chances of survival.
Our ancestors had no choice but to go vegan for long periods. Meat was not an easy source of food until animals were domesticated. Humans are opportunistic meat eaters, like our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobo monkeys
The only essential nutrient that is lacking in modern vegan diets is B12. But interestingly, the only reason B12 is lacking in vegan diets is because modern humans wash their food and B12 is found on the surface of many plants. Animals don’t eat washed food so by eating them, we can get the B12 we need. For almost all of our history, humans have been able to get enough B12 without eating animal products.
Not saying that a vegan diet is the ‘natural’ diet for humans, since we clearly evolved to be omnivorous, but we don’t seem to be designed to eat meat on a daily basis, which may explain why vegans/vegetarians, pescetarians and semi-vegetarians live longer on average.
Our ancestors hunted and they ate the most nutrient dense parts of the animal first, the organs, brains, and bone marrow, all high in natural fats. We naturally evolved as omnivores, eating from every food group. I understand the health reasons for having a plant based diet, however the naturally occurring amino acids present in meat that are vital to cell building in humans, are not found in plants. I think balance is the key. I eat a grain free diet with a good amount of healthy fat, good nutrient dense protein, and as many veggies as I can eat. I use honey/molasses to sweeten things, and I’m allergic to many modern grains, so those are not present in my diet. We evolved eating every type of food available, for me this is also how I eat.
Probably not. But what difference does it make? Could prehistoric humans live off the diet that their pre-human mammal ancestors lived off of, composed of the foods that were available to them at that time? What about their pre-mammal ancestors? Everything changes. But yeah it would probably be difficult to do without some degree of modern technology.
So many of our ancestors were mostly plant based, including gladiators (burly men). Being vegan eliminates the need for supplements and “fortified foods” by getting all your nutrients entirely from whole foods that aren’t processed with meat or dairy, so pretty much the exact opposite of what you’re saying. Read the China study to understand the amount of misinformation in today’s omnivore diet. The protein overload myth and the amount of cancers directly linked to meat are a huge component as to why switching to a plant based diet is crucial for health in addition to sustainability
I’d say this is highly contextual to environment. A lush, fertile area nearer the equator could have sustained a vegan lifestyle. If it actually ever happened… I don’t think anybody can say for sure when it comes to hunter-gatherer days.
Meat would have been especially useful to survive winter I imagine. I should say offal rather than meat, the organs are far more nutrient rich. The calories in the fat and the fact animals can be kept alive so they don’t go off would be of great benefit in harsh climates or times.
I’m vegan myself just to be transparent.
I don’t see many of them making a distinction. China probably has one on the oldest cuisines and they eat absolutely everything… Veggies, meat, bugs, nests. If there’s some semblance of nourishment, it gets eaten. It seems many vegan traditions sprung from religious doctrine.
It depends on how far back you go. We are biologically herbivorous. Our first diets consisted of mostly fruits and insects. We grind our food and are unable to eat meat the way a carnivore can. Once we developed tools and knives and fire, were we able to eat meat.
Look at other primates. We all have herbivorous jawlines, intestines, etc. even though we all also have canines.
Eating a lot of meat is fairly recent. Of course geography and where ancient falls on the time line will be a factor. Running down meat would be labor intensive for most of human evolution, it’s not something humans could consume everyday or even every week. Nomadic tribes ate more meat due to domestication but had to keep moving for the animals to graze. Even then it’s not practical to consume regularly.
For civilizations that were sedentary fruits and vegetables would have been more common. Egyptians 2nd and 3rd century have been discovered to consume mostly vegetarian diets. Wheat and barley seemed to play the biggest part in their diet but also garlic, eggplants, pears, and lentils. To a smaller extent millet and sorghum. A Roman gladiator diet was basically beans and barley. Calories have always been the name of the eating game, cultivating grains burn fewer and give more. Bread and civilizations have gone hand in hand.
Domesticating plants is a lot quicker than domesticating animals. The invention of agriculture helped increase human population once there was a predictable food source. Later we could domesticate animals for use aka milking, but it still didn’t make sense to eat meat constantly because there goes your milk. Modern westerns holidays like Christmas and Easter are tied to this by having a meat feature of ham. It was a big deal so let’s kill one of our pigs to celebrate. Keeping animals that eat your grain isn’t a good use of resources unless you have a surplus.
Exception to historically human vegetarianism, possibly some vegan, was in the Arctic, where “Inuit and other groups traditionally got as much as 99 percent of their calories from seals, narwhals, and fish.”
Why did we think ancient humans were all consuming meat eaters (Paleo diet) because bones preserve over time and can be used as tools. You can find a bone at an ancient site, plants disappear. It’s only now with more modern tech that the ground they farmed and teeth/stomachs can be examined to see what our ancestors ate primarily.