There are thousands of fledgling diets rampaging around the interweb these days, each of them clamouring desperately for your attention. So when you’re picking your next fat loss fix out of the hat, it’s worth considering which ones actually have some pedigree.
Fortunately, most of them share two common features. They don’t work over any respectable passage of time, and they didn’t exist a few years ago. Which means you can drop them from the raffle without losing any sleep.
But there are exceptions. Some, like the Mediterranean diet, have decades under their belt. Not a millenia like the olive oil fanatics claim, but it’s enough to put it on the scoreboard.
Then there’s the solitary bunch that can lay claim to being around way back in the stone age. One such one, being the carnivore template.
At the bare minimum, meat on meat has been around for a million years, including the entire span of the homo sapien lineage to date.
Whereas most diets fade into irrelevance after a single season, carnivore has passed hurdle after hurdle of cataclysmic events. The end of the ice age, the agricultural revolution, the bronze age collapse, even cristco.
This article is simply a tribute to various notable carnivores of history, who stayed true to steak, shunned carbs, and thrived for it.
The Carnivorous Caveman
(Somewhere between 2.6 million and 10,000 years ago)
Also going by other names, such as hunter-gather and palaeolithic pauper, the carnivorous caveman lived an isolated, nomadic life in his little corner of the vast Eurasian steppe.
Since weetabix hadn’t been invented at that point, and because edible plants were barely edible in the fleeting weeks they were in season, the carnivorous caveman had no choice but to eat meat.
Thankfully, meat happened to be available in extravagant amounts, and also had the fortune of being perfectly suited to fuel human biochemistry.
Spurred on by mammoth steak, the carnivorous caveman survived the unforgiving winters of the paleolithic wilderness, ensured his line went on for at least another generation, and probably went on to live into the very respectable 70’s.
He had plenty of time for leisure, possessed an appreciable athletic frame, and had zero chance of encountering diabetes. Compared to the neolithic farmer who followed in his wake, the carnivorous caveman lived a full life, and would have been the runaway winner if they’d decided to have a bench off. But the farmer would have likely had more grandkids standing at his deathbed, so there’s that.
Yamnaya Tribesman
(4000 BC)
Many rejected the shackles of porridge and continued to use meat as the cornerstone of their diet. But they still had to go with the times, and big mammals were in increasingly short supply.
So the carnivore holdouts figured out how to domesticate a few of the surviving species and use them for not just meat, but also for milk.
The Yamnaya tribesman was one such pastoralist, and despite being at the pinnacle of health, was generally feared and reviled.
Living in the early Bronze Age, he would have had full reign on the Eurasian steppe, thanks to their mastery of horse riding, muscular physiques, and aptitude for raping and pillaging. Hence why the Yamnaya weren’t too popular with the city folk inhabiting the nearby grain states.
It’s a shame we don’t have better records of the elusive Bronze Age, but that’s what you get when the civilisations that partake in record keeping get wiped out in a mysterious cataclysmic event.
As it is, we know they started off in central Asia, and managed to massacre their way as far as Britain, upon which the builders of Stonehenge soon met their demise.
For what it’s worth, I’m not supporting their behaviour. But it can’t be denied that they were a prolific people, and set the precedent for one of the most notorious carnivore tribes in history.
Suevi Barbarian
(50 BC)
The word barbarian has somewhat of a negative connotation, and there’s a good reason for it. Barbarians lived beyond the outskirts of civilisation. And in a sense, beyond history. Because it was those civilisations that kept the records that endured into modernity.
These ‘noble savages’ often lived their lives scattered across numerous villages, and united with their tribal overlords for the odd battle or mass migration. When they entered history, it was often as a cataclysmic threat. The rest of the time, it meant the civilisations were expanding their borders.
Barbarians were typically portrayed as blood-thirsty, shabby, and illiterate. They also loved their meat, which somehow placed them a level below the grain-based diets of the nation states. Despite being constantly touted for being freakishly strong and tall in stature.
One such tribe were the Suevi, a Germanic peoples who lived east of the Rhine. Julius Caesar, during his conquest of Gaul, noted that the Suevi were the largest and most warlike of all the Germanic nations.
The Suevi subsisted through animal husbandry and hunting, and were a constant thorn in Rome’s side, repeatedly staging invasions across the timeline of the empire, and eventually getting their own slice of the pie when things came crumbling down in the 5th century AD.
For savages, they were pretty prolific. Almost as if the word ‘barbarian’ was really just a means for grain states to justify their conquests and to convince everyone that oat and barley were fantastic nutritional sources.
On average, Germanic tribesmen would have been around 5’10, while Roman soldiers middled at 5’6. Let that be a lesson for those of you struggling to get your protein count.
Mongol Warrior
(1220 AD)
The 1200s weren’t a good time to be living as a clerk in Baghdad, a taxman in China or a knight in Hungary. Not many places were safe against the irrepressible tide of the Mongol horde.
If the son of Genghis Khan hadn’t drunk himself to death, there’s a very good chance that they would have continued their conquering all the way to the shores of the Atlantic.
There wasn’t an army in the middle ages that could go toe to toe with Mongols without getting utterly decimated. And there were several reasons for their dominance. The Mongols perfected the use of the horse for hit-and-run attacks and ambush tactics.
They had the revolutionary tactics of appointing leaders by merit and bringing in human ingenuity from all parts of the empire. When they had to be, they were ruthless, putting entire cities to the sword when they rebelled one too many times.
But it also helped that the Mongol warriors dined almost entirely on meat and milk, echoing the Yamnaya people that came thousands of years before, and very much inline with their livelihoods as nomadic pastoralists.
For the most part, the food came from lamb, beef, mutton, horse, and copious quantities of mare’s milk. This gave them two decisive advantages. For one, they were stronger than any foes they came across, especially the chinese troops who had to get by on gruel. As a second, their armies had no need for supply lines and could cover distances that were completely unprecedented.
The Mongols were also thoroughly disgusted at the idea that farmers ate plants that grew in the dirt and had often been fertilised with excrement. Vegetables were called “goat food”. Their warriors were noted for their height, strength, and aggression on the battlefield.
Until they imploded from within, the Mongols had no rivals. And though their reign at the top of the world pyramid was brief, they left a mark deep enough that it can be felt to this day. Global trade? You have the Mongols to thank for it. Don’t let the burning of Baghdad fool you, these guys contributed more to culture than they took away.
Nomadic Inuit
(To Present Day)
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Inuits aren’t really into fresh vegetables. Broccoli doesn’t grow so well up in the arctic. Nothing grows well.
So for the people crazy enough to live their lives in the unforgiving cold, and smart enough to skip the processed foods being shuttled up from the south, they have to forgo their five a day and make do with whatever meat is crazy enough to be up there with them.
The dietary antics of the Inuits are fairly well known thanks to the Vilhjalmur Stefansson, an arctic explorer who lived with a few of the nomadic tribes over the span of a few years. He remarked on the fact that the Inuits looked the picture of health despite completely lacking plant foods for huge swathes of the year.
No oranges, and yet, no scurvy. He later wrote a book, The Fat Of The Land, which described the diet of the Inuits, and their love affair with caribou and seal liver.
“The chief food of a certain group of Eskimos with whom I lived was caribou meat, with perhaps 30 per cent fish, 10 per cent seal meat, and 5 or 10 per cent made up of polar bear, rabbits, birds, and eggs.”
“The chief occasion for vegetables here, as with most Eskimos, was a famine.”
Wrapping Up
Carnivory has an unmatched track record, stretching back to the dawn of Homo Sapiens, and well back through the Homo genus.
Through the stone age, the vast steppe wilderness, the dense forests of Germany, and the blistering cold of the Arctic, people have continued to shun vegetables and prize red meat above all. For their efforts, they’ve thrived.
So it’s worth considering that the next time you hear someone label carnivore ‘a fad diet’. It’s been doing laps long, long before the vegan diet became a thing.
