How did cavemen eat and live?

How did cavemen eat and live?

They probably ate plants and the occasional cooked animal

Walmarts.

Op here this is my theory. While hunting, they would eat tubers. Potatoes and yam etc. This is for immediate energy so they could run and chase animals. Other things they would eat are leaves and plants. Some fruit and nuts I guess all depending on seasons. These would not be so abundant. Their protein sources while hunting would be bugs and insects. These are easy to catch and easy to eat and digest. Having a big piece of meat sit in the stomach for 8 hours would not be good while having to run and chase things.
My guess is meat and fish would only be eaten later in the day.

cavemen were hunters and gatherers
farming didnt really catch on til way later. they probably felt like idiots when they realized they could breed their food and grow crops

They lived on a healthy Vegan diet as nature intended.

>Lived by breathing and drinking water and eating food.
>Ate by putting dead animal meat/berries/whatever cavemen ate in their mouths, chewing, and swallowing.

I mean come on.

mostly plants, including wild grains, and any animal they could catch or find already dead.

What was I thinking posting this is the mcchiken board

Beer is the reason we even have a society.
Fermentation requires you stay in the same place for an extended period.
Which requires you to plant and tend to crops.
Beer created civilisation.

Opportunistic omnivores. We don't really know precisely what made up paleolithic diets, and it most likely varied depending on what was available in the area. One of the traits of Homo sapiens sapiens is that we'll eat damn near anything edible, and when we can we'll process inedible stuff into something edible.

paleo

I hate you fucking hipsters. MUHHH BEER CREATED CIVILIZATION

No. It didn't. It helped but so did many things.

and sustained us throughout the subsequent millennia in the absence of safe drinking water until ~100 yrs ago

hence the prevalence in many languages throughout the old world of the word for beer/alcohol being translatable to 'life water'

Anthology is hipsterism.
OK BUB

As a matter of fact, we do. We have lots of cave paintings of them hunting wild game. Obviously, they hunted quite a bit.

Except they didn't. When we dig up the garbage pits, we find a few animal bones, but the vast majority is clam and oyster shells and small bones stained with pigment.

So think this through: hunting is dangerous, and if you tripped and broke a leg, nobody knew how to set a bone. Compare that to oysters where you can basically dive down and grab handfuls of them at little to no risk.

Their main diet was wild fruit and grains, plus oysters, clams, fish, seafood, plus some fowl and red meat from occasional hunting.

We even know how they hunted. Primitive bows were mediocre hunting weapons, though a spear is still a spear. We do know that because most animals vent heat through their mouths, while humans vent heat off their whole skin, humans can outlast almost any animal in a long-distance race. So, they would get the animal wounded and running with flint arrows, wait for it to tire and bleed out, then close in and finish it with spears.

There ya' go OP, that's what paleolithic and neolithic man ate and how they got it, and what they did with the scraps.

Why not look at archaeological, anthropological, and biological evidence before coming up with theories there OP?

Quite a few centuries of thought, exploration, and experiment have gone into this.

Wow great post.
Good idea I'll try that.

OOGA BOOGA, ME AND MAN FOLK HUNT MAMMOTH. WOMAN AND FAGS LIKE OP PICK BERRIES.

Nope, and nope. How could we have grown the crops to brew beer, if we didn't already have an agricultural civilization?

We have beer because we settled down and practiced agriculture.

Also, no, not all water was a toxic cesspool, people didn't exclusively drink and bathe in beer until 100 years ago. That's a dumb myth that was destroyed long ago. Even people in the Dark Ages/ Early Medieval ca 800 CE were aware of clean water vs. filthy water. There are such things as natural springs and hand-dug wells, and people were smart enough not to squat and drop a deuce in the village water supply.

Run around and eat what doesn't kill you.

lost

ate mostly fruit veg n nuts. maybe picked flesh off a dead carcass once in a while

they lived active. moved around all day doing things necessary for survival

They ate an exclusively vegan diet and were at one with mother nature. Then the white middle-aged man came and ruined everything.

they ate dinosaurs to extinction i reckon

Protein rich cacao bliss balls, kale smoothies, quinoa, etc.

nice one

Unsafe drinking water wasn't a real problem until population became a lot denser.

In any case, beer of the sort we drink now makes a net loss of water. Only "small" beer, with less than 2% alcohol, could provide you with water. It's impossible to get drunk on 2% or less.

they lived in caves and ate dinosaurs

Meat was hard to catch and when they managed to kill something there wasn't a lot to go around for the whole tribe so they did eat meat but very little. Despite what some vegan revisitionists say our primitive diet was mostly fruit (especially grains) with a little bit of meat. We're omnivorous frugivores by nature

Ya know going back and watching the Flinstones now, everything seems so dated.

Flintstones always looked dated to me. Was born in 1987.

agreed. why would you have a car powered by your feet and not a chariot pulled by tame velociraptors?

And nobody has the last name Flintstone anymore

What did they use to open cans? Or clamshell packets?

It must have been difficult.

>when they managed to kill something there wasn't a lot to go around

Yeah, those mammoths were about the size of a rabbit. Barely enough for each person to have a bite.

Everything I have read about preohistoric man indicates that being a hunter gatherer was pretty easy and chill.
>not a ton of people to feed
>food grows everywhere
>hunters would take down dozens of animals per hunt
>people only had to work a few hours a day
>everyone worked together

Then as population grew and that became untenable:
>back breaking work to prepare huge fields
>can't live near neighbors
>constant tending of crops and animals
>just massive prep work to keep the ground fertile year after year

And because I know people will say I'm talking out of my ass.

>people were smart enough not to squat and drop a deuce in the village water supply.


You've never been to India

Somewhere between mundane humans and dogs.

What the fuck are you on about?

What's with the dinos user? How many you got?

...

Your wall/bookshelf looks neato user. Would you take a picture of it zoomed out a bit?

Is that Chicago?

What's going on here why are they sitting in garbage

A few.

What about the winter in northern europe, though? I'd imagine it'd be a bit more than chill and not that easy.

looking for shit to sell. its their livelihood

Must be nice to live like that

You've never played EVE online before?

Well, at least you contradicted yourself with shitty books, fag.

I know they aren't as good as the lists you read on cracked but I think they have a little research put into them, mouth breathing cumbucket.

They also ate young animals. Picked off a lost baby mammoth that wandered to close and was still blind.

They usually ate baby mammoths or elderly mammoths on their last legs. Scatter a herd and kill the weak. A mammoth could feed a tribe for months, it's why we find butchered carcasses at the bottoms of cold springs, theory on that they broke ice and dumped remains in winter to preserve it.

>Little research
I mean that's still an exaggeration on the content of those "novels". You shillin' son?

I'm not shilling for anyone. I love reading about ancient peoples lifestyles and that overlaps into food. I put up a brief summary of some of the things I've read and posted a picture of a few of the books I got the information from.
I still have shelves of books about ancient hunting, studies into the branching of tribes, theories about the first bone tools, information on whether or not women gatherers were as prominent as believed and how much diet was actually meat.

But apparently some other random guy on the internet has read every single book on the topic and knows the exact books I posted and has read them and can judge them as being false and will call me a fag while doing so.

Nice to know that you'll admit when your wrong and when you have sand in your vagina

I'm not wrong. Tell me why I am and hard mode: You can't use Far Cry Primal as a reference.

They also levered off huge boulders from the top of canyon walls onto herds below killing healthy adults as well.

You know Neolithic human also knew not to feed the troll.

Isn't that mostly conjecture from what might have just been rock slides? Or were there remains of spears? Because that sounds reasonable.

Also buffalo jumping was a thing.

They didn't live. They are all dead.

...

>How did cavemen eat
>Og eats [thing]
>Og does not die
>clan eats [thing]
OR
>Og eats [thing]
>Og dies
>Mog is new Taster of Things

Trial and error, basically.

>and live?
Not the board for general archaeology/anthropology questions.

Like kings

Fake. Spray paint wasn't invented then.

(You)

I find it so very hard to believe that these people never grasped the concept behind agriculture for thousands of years.

Mini-plants growing beneath adult plants is god-damn obvious.

It may have been due to he climate. Can't really settle an area when you have to escape southwards every winter.

lol

They don't; that's why they're extinct now.

They hid in trees like pussies and ate bugs.

Mammoths didn't live everywhere early humans did. Most stone age people of Africa and Southern Eurasia didn't have access to animals that big.

You all are extinct in like 20 years anyway

>not a ton of people to feed
A family of 5 is a ton of people to feed. For one hunter to reproduce above sustaining level, he'd need to get his woman pregnant about 6 times, because half would die before age 2. Pregnant women eat lots of food, or they die. Children eat lots of food. Hunter need food for energy to hunt.
>food grows everywhere
No. Food grows everywhere in spring and some of summer. You're also competing with the wildlife for easy calories like fruit and nuts.
>hunters would take down dozens of animals per hunt
No. Even with GUNS a hunter is lucky to kill one or two animals in a month. Imagine doing this with vine or hair nets, simple stone spears, and thrown rocks.
>people only had to work a few hours a day
In winter, yes, in fall, you worked every daylight hour to prepare for winter, and smoked any meat or fish you could find all night long to preserve it for the winter.
>everyone worked together
To a degree. People worked on things they were good at, and traded for what they couldn't get themselves.
A guy who was good at breaking flint arrowheads or spearheads with barbs might make a dozen of them every day and trade them to a hunter for food and pelts, because the hunter wouldn't be as successful with his own shitty spear/arrowheads, or didn't have the time to make them.

Wine is easier to make and has been around longer

This really depends on where you live

>Am caveman.
>Palate is not sullied by decadent modern food like pure oil, copious sea salt, refined sugar.
>When hungry eat anything that moves that I can put my hands on.
>Try eating anything that isn't dirt if I'm really hungry.
>Didn't die/get sick? Remember what it looked like so if I see it again I can eat it in a pinch.
>Communicate with fellow cavemen on what they ate that day, share food that was left over so our mental food library grows.
>Depending on the era you're talking about when I'm not hungry I do things like make/repair dry shelter and make things for "funses.".

We literally hold bottled lightening in our hands that lets us communicate with other people thousands of miles away from us. Imagining what cavemen were like is not rocket science. I doubt you are an expert on foraging. Go out int he forest with no way home and stay there for a year, that's pretty much what it was like.

>That hand print

What a fucking ham planet.

Yea.. no. We were designed to have protein in our system regardless.

Good thread; good posts.
Long story short:

Prior to cultivating fire, ancient humans ate raw foods. First scraps of dead animals and raw vegetation. We're taking about our ancestors here, so the whole internal anatomy was different. Eventually the use of fire was cultivated, which changed everything, top to bottom. Cooking anything basically pre-digests it--especially meat--which allowed for a sharp evolutionary turn. Less gut work, more input to brain function--bigger brains, smaller guts theory.

Brain evolution led to terrestrial exploration, tool making, and new ways of using fire to cook food. Mastering fire allowed for an evolutionary jump, biologically and intellectually. Higher protein, less raw (nutritionally lacking) foods. Those groups reproduced and spread, accordingly.

In another sense...can you believe...we came from them? Not in a bad way. To be so stripped bare, in a world so unforgiving. A wild animal..us. Eating a plant and dying...then others knew not to eat that plant...being raided by more savvy bands of savages...not knowing what lightning is...or enduring a volcano...no sirens and shit...

Life is weird, man.

>>back breaking work to prepare huge fields
That's what slaves are for

>When we dig up the garbage pits, we find a few animal bones
Any bone big enough to have a decent amount of marrow would have been shattered and sucked clean.

mead. not beer. beer came later and helped, but mead is the reason we have a society.