The Myth of the 100,000-Year-Old Diet

“Data from a new archeological dig proves that The Paleo Diet® got it wrong.”

That’s a headline we’ve seen sporadically over the years: an archeologist assesses a new site, unearthing evidence that a Paleolithic society must have eaten differently from what many believe about The Paleo Diet. Media commentators then pile on, asserting that we got it all wrong.

A recent example is research from a site in Taforalt, Morocco. Analysis indicated a heavy reliance on plant food, which was then used as evidence that the meat-heavy Paleo diet got it wrong. [1] In my initial response, I didn’t have any criticism of the study. It was very well conducted. My issues are with how the study was interpreted.

To start, let’s debunk the “meat-heavy” myth: Most people on a Paleo diet typically eat more plant food than meat, by volume. The Paleo Diet is an omnivore diet. Therefore, an archeological dig showing that one ancestral society ate a lot of plant food doesn’t prove or disprove anything about modern Paleo diets. To imply that The Paleo Diet is heavily meat focused is to misunderstand the science altogether.

Second, even the scientist who wrote the Taforalt study confirmed that the society they were studying lived after the Paleolithic era and was already transitioning to an agricultural way of eating. The society referenced, therefore, didn’t even represent the Paleolithic Era.

But, even if it had, we’d have to be very careful about looking at a single archeological dig and saying it definitively represents the Paleolithic Era.

Just One Piece of the Paleo Puzzle

The Paleolithic era endured over one million years. If you think of it as a 5,000-piece puzzle, any one of these archeological digs is just one piece of the puzzle. Each piece provides new and important information, but we can’t draw conclusions about the completed puzzle from just a single piece.

Of course, that metaphor can be flipped around and offers what I personally consider a valid criticism of The Paleo Diet.

I was on a podcast recently in which the host pointed out that all we have are a few archeological digs where they unearthed maybe a couple bones and some very old tools. In other words, we have—at best—50 to 100 pieces of that 5,000-piece puzzle. We have some ideas about how Paleolithic people lived, but we don’t know the whole picture. Now, that’s a fair criticism.

Neither I nor any of our team here at The Paleo Diet is going to claim that we know definitively what the prototypical Paleolithic diet consisted of. But likewise, no one can look at a single archeological dig and say it proves anything. There were many different variations of the diet during that time period and each archeological dig shows just one piece.

“Modern” Hunter-Gatherers Paint a More Complete Picture

When European explorers started venturing out into the world, they encountered many hunter-gatherer societies untouched by agriculture and Western culture of the time. They were essentially “modern representations” of our Paleolithic ancestors. Thankfully, the explorers who encountered them took detailed notes of what they saw—not only of their dietary patterns but of their lifestyle, too.

Those accounts offer a much clearer and more complete picture of the whole hunter-gatherer puzzle than do archeological surveys of Paleolithic life.

While developing The Paleo Diet concept, Dr. Loren Cordain (founder of The Paleo Diet) and his mentor Dr. Boyd Eaton wrote a scientific review that synthesized data from over 200 of those contemporary accounts of modern hunter-gatherer societies. It is arguably one of the most important papers in The Paleo Diet scientific literature and tells us more about how hunter-gatherers ate than any archeological dig.

In their paper, titled Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets, [2] Cordain and Eaton found the following:

1. There was no one diet. Different societies ate different foods. There was no one diet that every hunter-gatherer society ate. And in fact, the variance was quite large.
2. They ate a broad mix of plants and animals. There was a very wide range in how much animal and plant food they relied on. Societies closer to the equator ate a lot more plant food, while societies in colder climates ate a lot more animal food. No society was vegan, and few ate a strictly carnivore diet. That choice was only made when there were simply no plant foods available, such as in northern climates during the winter months.
3. What they did eat: Their diets were invariably a mix of vegetables, fruit, seafood, meat, and some nuts, seeds, and honey.
4. What they didn’t eat: What no society ate was heavily processed foods, dairy in adulthood, and grains. There was some experimentation with grains, but it was never a staple of the diet.
5. They didn’t age the way we do or suffer from chronic disease. European explorers were constantly surprised by how robust the elderly were in hunter-gatherer societies. They weren’t quite as strong as their younger counterparts, but were still highly active, fit, and free of diseases like cancer and heart disease. And that wasn’t because they died before they were forty. All of these societies had many members who had lived past 70.

That review was written in 1999.

Which means that the founders of The Paleo Diet have been saying that there is no definitive “Paleo” diet and that a diet high in plant food is consistent with The Paleo Diet concept for more than 25 years.

The 100,000-Year-Old Diet Myth

Every year, U.S. News & World Report publishes a ranking of various popular diets. The Paleo Diet never fares well, despite multiple peer-reviewed meta-analyses comparing the most popular diets, where The Paleo Diet is always at the top of the list or on par with U.S. News’ recommended diets. [3–9] In the 2025 U.S. News ranking, three of the four reviewers criticized The Paleo Diet for being misguided because it’s impossible to eat the way we did 100,000 years ago.

They’re right. It is not possible to eat the way we did back then. Here’s why:

1. There was no one diet 100,000 years ago. As pointed out above, hunter-gatherers ate very differently depending on where and when they lived. So, there isn’t one definitive list of foods that our Paleolithic ancestors ate.
2. Those foods don’t exist anymore. While humans haven’t changed much in 100,000 years, our foods have. We have done a lot of selective breeding. Breeding is just a term for rapid, controlled evolution. The foods we ate back then don’t exist anymore—they’ve been mostly bred out of existence.

I agree fully with that criticism. My only counterargument is that they’re not actually criticizing The Paleo Diet. They are misinterpreting the science when they claim that we advocate eating exactly what our ancestors ate 100,000 years ago.

So, if The Paleo Diet isn’t about eating a 100,000-year-old diet, then what is it about? I’ll answer that question with an analogy.

An Analogy from Endurance Sports

I spent decades as a cycling coach. One of the first things I learned was that if you work with someone who has spent years on the couch doing zero training, any exercise is going to make them fitter—even a suboptimal training plan.

Many lucrative fitness fads were built on this simple formula. They ascended like plasma-powered rockets because, compared to sitting on the couch, they produced satisfying results. But that doesn’t make them good training programs.

A colleague of mine, Dr. Stephen Seiler, recognized this problem in sports and revolutionized the endurance world by making one important shift. Instead of researching what improves unfit people—which is just about anything—he spent a lot of time observing how world and Olympic champions train.

What Seiler discovered was that, while the specifics of their training plans were vastly different, there was an overall consistency in their training, which he called the Polarized Model. Basically, champions spent 80 to 90% of their time going very easy and 10-15% of the time going very hard.

His genius was not in developing a single specific training plan that worked for all athletes. No such training plan exists. Instead, what he did was to create a set of principles or an overall template based on what was proven to work. This provided a framework for researchers to do better research.

Seiler’s model helped Norwegian athletes win many gold medals. But more importantly, it gave athletes and coaches a better framework for developing effective individualized training plans. He didn’t get into the minutia of which specific intervals to perform or how many hours to train. He left that up to each athlete and coach to figure out.

It should probably come as no surprise that the polarized approach closely mimics how our Paleolithic ancestors stayed fit. During their hunts, they spent lots of time doing very slow running and walking, interspersed with intense efforts going in for the kill. [10] 

Do we train exactly the way they did? No. At least no more than we eat exactly the way they did. But the principles are the same and more importantly, they work. Applying the principles of the polarized approach has won countless championships.

Identifying one hunter-gatherer society that performed their hunts differently (such as the Inuit, for one) wouldn’t change that fact.

The Paleo Diet Is a Science-Based Framework, Not a Specific Diet

As the CEO of The Paleo Diet, I tell our team constantly that we need to keep an open mind and follow the science. I’ve made only one absolute decree in our office—we can’t use the word “caveman.” I forbade the term because it implies that The Paleo Diet is an old-fashioned diet based on a cartoonish perception of Paleolithic people and insufficient science.

Of course, Paleolithic peoples couldn’t eat the kind of varied diet that we can easily grab in a simple visit to most supermarkets. So calling it the “caveman diet,” while cute, is truly a misnomer. I prefer to call The Paleo Diet a model rather than a diet.

Just as Dr. Seiler revolutionized endurance sports, Dr. Loren Cordain revolutionized nutrition science by flipping the script and saying, “Let’s not start with the Western Diet.” That’s because most dieticians would agree that it’s hard to find a diet that’s worse for us than the heavily processed modern Western diet. A 2022 meta-analysis compared several popular diets in terms of their ability to prevent chronic disease. While The Paleo Diet was top of the list, the Western Diet was at the very bottom. [3] 

The Western Diet is personified by the couch-potato who hasn’t worked out in years. Any dietary approach, be it Paleo, Keto, Atkins, DASH, plant-based, or Mediterranean, is going to make someone surviving on the typical Western Diet healthier. Even if the proposed solution is just a “slightly less bad” diet.

This is why the media’s reporting on diet research is so confusing. One month, research shows a vegetarian diet is better. Then a different study shows a carnivore diet is better. And what’s even more confusing is: both are correct. Any of these diets represents a vast improvement over the food the subjects were eating previously.

Dr. Cordain’s genius was not that he came up with one very specific diet. His genius, like Dr. Seiler, was to find the commonalities in the food habits of our Paleolithic ancestors—the equivalent of Olympic eaters. Then he developed a set of principles based on those commonalities.

And like the Polarized Model, the principles of The Paleo Diet® are very simple at their core. They state that we should simply eat the categories of foods our ancestors ate and mostly avoid the foods they didn’t eat. Paleolithic people primarily ate nutrient-dense and natural vegetables, fish, fruit, meats, nuts, and seeds. They didn’t eat grains, dairy, heavily processed foods, or lots of added sugar and salt—because they couldn’t. These foods were simply unavailable in their era.

What Dr. Cordain never did was get into the specifics of precisely which foods we need to eat, or how much carbohydrate should be in our diet, or what ratio of plant and animal food we should eat.

This means that anyone who criticizes the diet based on its protein ratio, its alleged primary focus on meat-consumption, or because of one particular archeological dig, is criticizing it based on specifics that were never part of The Paleo Diet.

Just as Dr. Seiler created a set of training principles but left the specifics up to the coaches and athletes, The Paleo Diet provides a very flexible framework for each dietician and individual to evaluate what works best for their health.

If you want to eat some grains, go ahead. We’re certain that at various points and locations in ancient history our ancestors did eat them. But keep them limited because we’re also certain that they were never a “staple,” and evidence shows they can be inflammatory. Of course, if you have an autoimmune condition like Celiac disease, you should avoid them altogether. Likewise, if you want to eat a lot more plant food than meat, that’s completely fine. The Paleo Diet simply recommends that people focus on unprocessed and minimally processed fruits and vegetables… not white bread and pasta.

The Paleo Diet Is a Very Modern Diet

The Paleo Diet was never about eating a mythical, unknowable diet that our ancestors ate 100,000 years ago. Like the Dr. Seiler’s Polarized model, it is a set of principles, a framework based on our physiology. The genius of Dr. Cordain’s approach is that he said: “Let’s not start with what is arguably the worst diet in human history and figure out how to improve it.” After all, almost any intervention would be a healthy improvement for today’s average consumer.

Instead, let’s start with a set of principles or a template based on the commonalities of how our bodies were designed to eat. Then, let’s use that framework to assess current research and to personalize the specifics to each individual.

This makes The Paleo Diet model anything but a 100,000-year-old diet. It is a modern, flexible framework.

I love digging into archeological evidence, but a specific food item unearthed in an isolated dig doesn’t change the modern science of The Paleo Diet.

References

[1] Moubtahij Z, McCormack J, Bourgon N, Trost M, Sinet-Mathiot V, Fuller BT, et al. Isotopic evidence of high reliance on plant food among Later Stone Age hunter-gatherers at Taforalt, Morocco. Nat Ecol Evol 2024;8:1035–45. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02382-z.

[2] Cordain L, Miller JB, Eaton SB, Mann N, Holt SH, Speth and JD. Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets. Am J Clin Nutr 2000;71:682–92. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10702160/

[3] Liang S, Mijatovic J, Li A, Koemel N, Nasir R, Toniutti C, et al. Dietary Patterns and Non-Communicable Disease Biomarkers: A Network Meta-Analysis and Nutritional Geometry Approach. Nutrients 2022;15:76. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu15010076.

[4] Ghaedi E, Mohammadi M, Mohammadi H, Ramezani-Jolfaie N, Malekzadeh J, Hosseinzadeh M, et al. Effects of a Paleolithic Diet on Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. Adv Nutr 2019;10:634–46. https://doi.org/10.1093/advances/nmz007.

[5] Snetselaar LG, Cheek JJ, Fox SS, Healy HS, Schweizer ML, Bao W, et al. Efficacy of Diet on Fatigue and Quality of Life in Multiple Sclerosis. Neurology 2023;100:e357–66. https://doi.org/10.1212/wnl.0000000000201371.

[6] Menezes EVA de, Sampaio HA de C, Carioca AAF, Parente NA, Brito FO, Moreira TMM, et al. Influence of Paleolithic diet on anthropometric markers in chronic diseases: systematic review and meta-analysis. Nutr J 2019;18:41. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12937-019-0457-z.

[7] Frączek B, Pięta A, Burda A, Mazur-Kurach P, Tyrała F. Paleolithic Diet—Effect on the Health Status and Performance of Athletes? Nutrients 2021;13:1019. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu13031019.

[8] Manheimer EW, Zuuren EJ van, Fedorowicz Z, Pijl H. Paleolithic nutrition for metabolic syndrome: systematic review and meta-analysis 1 , 2. Am J Clin Nutr 2015;102:922–32. https://doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.115.113613.

[9] Jamka M, Kulczyński B, Juruć A, Gramza-Michałowska A, Stokes CS, Walkowiak J. The Effect of the Paleolithic Diet vs. Healthy Diets on Glucose and Insulin Homeostasis: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. J Clin Med 2020;9:296. https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm9020296.

[10] Cordain L, Friel J. The Paleo Diet for Athletes: The Ancient Nutritional Formula for Peak Athletic Performance. Rev. New York: Rodale; 2012.