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Not sure what a traditional bushman is. Are you refering to the san bushmen who eat a lot of mongongo nuts? That is a strange exception, and those people are

Not sure what a traditional bushman is. Are you refering to the san bushmen who eat a lot of mongongo nuts? That is a strange exception, and those people are hunters who eat a lot of meat anyway. There are abundant written accounts of native north americans. There were those who grew corn and squash, which means they have little in common with paleolithic humans who had no such crops. And there are those that did not grow crops and ate mostly game and fish. Anywhere away from the equator there is virtually no gatherable plant food for most of the year. Before domesticated crops, people clearly ate mostly animals, fish, and insects.

netsp 17y ago
2 Things - I'm not sure how much it matters what we ate 20,000 years ago. For example, lactose tolerance is assumed to have developed very recently in most places. People are opportunistic omnivores and it would make sense for them to be able to adapt quickly (several generations) to new eating habits. - Guessing what people ate is tricky. If all we have to go on is modern evidence, we have a huge level of disparity. Also, just because (for example) New Guineans were primarily hunter gatherers in modern times doesn't automatically mean they were similar in every other way to pre historic Europeans.
pg 17y ago
San = Bushman. The reason I mentioned them is that they preserved their hunter-gatherer culture till a few decades ago, and anthropologists were able to measure what they actually ate, which was mostly vegetables. You respond to this contrary evidence by simply restating your claim. There was "virtually no" plant food, and people "clearly" lived mostly on meat. Do you have any evidence at all?
- kingkongrevenge 17y ago
  I pointed out the San are a rare exception. You were trying to make a general case from this. The other ethnographies and historical accounts show high meat consumption. I also suspect the san you are talking about are stunted and trying to get by on marginal land without much game, and so not a good sample. It bears repeating the simple fact that most places don't have wild plant food for most of the year. Pick up the army survival manual. It's mostly about how to fish and trap in many different ecosystems, because, as it explains, there isn't much wild plant food out there most of the time.

netsp 17y ago

2 Things - I'm not sure how much it matters what we ate 20,000 years ago. For example, lactose tolerance is assumed to have developed very recently in most places. People are opportunistic omnivores and it would make sense for them to be able to adapt quickly (several generations) to new eating habits. - Guessing what people ate is tricky. If all we have to go on is modern evidence, we have a huge level of disparity. Also, just because (for example) New Guineans were primarily hunter gatherers in modern times doesn't automatically mean they were similar in every other way to pre historic Europeans.

pg 17y ago

San = Bushman. The reason I mentioned them is that they preserved their hunter-gatherer culture till a few decades ago, and anthropologists were able to measure what they actually ate, which was mostly vegetables. You respond to this contrary evidence by simply restating your claim. There was "virtually no" plant food, and people "clearly" lived mostly on meat. Do you have any evidence at all?

kingkongrevenge 17y ago
I pointed out the San are a rare exception. You were trying to make a general case from this. The other ethnographies and historical accounts show high meat consumption. I also suspect the san you are talking about are stunted and trying to get by on marginal land without much game, and so not a good sample. It bears repeating the simple fact that most places don't have wild plant food for most of the year. Pick up the army survival manual. It's mostly about how to fish and trap in many different ecosystems, because, as it explains, there isn't much wild plant food out there most of the time.