Stone Age hunters ate not only meat

Hunters in the Stone Age ate large amounts of protein from fish, lean meat, herbs and coarse green. It has become the foundation of one of the major health trends: Stone Age diet.

The modern version of the Stone Age diet excludes most carbohydrate-rich foods based on the idea that in the Stone Age had neither bread, rice or pasta.

But can it really be true that people ate so little carbohydrate in the Stone Age?

Archaeologist and botanist Sabine Karg, who is external professor at the Saxo Institute at Copenhagen University, has spent the last 25 years to specialize in ancient biology.

She says that hunters in the stone age, in contrast to many followers of the modern Stone Age diet, happily munched carbohydrates if the opportunity arose.

- Carbohydrates have been part of the diet. In flooded settlements have been found traces of both roots and seeds of various aquatic plants and wild grasses, she says.

Was not discriminating

The modern version of the Stone Age diet excludes all reminiscent of bread, rice, pasta, pulses and milk. But according to Karg was not in the stone age hunters as discerning.

Easily digestible food with a high energy content was a welcome touch, and there are traces of carbohydrate-containing foods on the old settlement.

- What one finds is dependent on preservation conditions and how cooked food. For us, good conditions, particularly in flooded settlements, where organic material is preserved well and the fire team or hearths, said Karg.

- For example, we found seeds from wild grasses and aquatic plants, and roots. Especially when you were not lucky with the hunt, you had to dig up the roots.

9000 years of Stone Age diet

Stone's menu was very different in different areas and in different seasons. In Denmark, people lived by hunting and gathering for more than 9000 years, before letting on and became farmers.

During the 9000's there was a varied environment: from the bottom frozen landscape that resembles today's Greenland, an archipelago with warm temperatures today southern European holiday destinations.

Among the starch sources that archaeologists have so far encountered on, among other things it acorns and wild rower, who later became both beets and sugar beet.

Compared with day diet characterized by lots of protein, less fat, and low in carbohydrates.

You are what you eat

The diet does a lot for your health. It was equally true in the stone age as today. To learn something about the health of the hunters in the stone age, you must examine the preserved bones and teeth.

Pia Bennike, which is biological anthropologist and associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, says:

- Dental health was on top. 

There is very little tooth loss, and they have no caries. They have in fact been taking very little sugar. There has been limited to honey. The starch sources they had, for example, roots, coarse diet that actually cleans teeth.

The food was less prepared

In return, says Bennike, Stone Age hunter has had good use for the healthy teeth:

- It is clear on the skull that they had a powerful chewing apparatus, and that they have suffered a lot of teeth. It shows that you have eaten coarse fare, but also that they may not have prepared food as much as we do.

- Caries occurs at the beginning of the Neolithic (Stone Age farmers) and is more common in the Iron Age and Viking. It occurs in line with that one begins to eat more carbohydrates, but also more processed foods.

The hunters had strong bones

The skeleton also shows that hunters were healthy. Yet they lived not so long.

- There are few traces of the disease on the bones, but it is also because the average age was not so high. They survived until they were adults, on average, about 35-40 years, says Bennike.

- Bone quality was better than today, but the question is whether it is due to diet or physical activity. Both have probably had an impact, but I think the physical activity was the most important. There may also be a matter of a developmental traits, the farther we go back in time, the stronger the bones.

Got calcium from shellfish

Today Danish health authorities recommend that you drink at least a pint of milk a day. But milk is not part of the Stone Age diet, so hunters must have got calcium from other places.

- Calcium is found in lots of other things, such as shellfish, so I think they've ingested enough. They have, as Stone Age people in the Arctic, ingested enough that any problems have not been shown before a certain age, say Bennike.

Stone Age hunters had strong bones and strong teeth. They lived an active life and ate a coarse diet that consisted of everything edible they could get their hands in.