This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.
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What were early hunter-gatherers’ food choices? What did they eat? How did their food affect their health?
Hunter-gatherers ate broadly: termites, berries, roots, rabbits, bison, and mammoth, among other foods. Their varied diet likely contributed to their health and lack of disease.
We’ll cover why hunter-gatherers’ food choices were healthy and how hunter-gatherers lived.
Were Hunter-Gatherer Foods Healthy?
There were a couple of reasons foragers were taller and healthier than Sapiens after the Agricultural Revolution. One of them was hunter-gatherers’ food choices.
Varied Diet
Because early hunter-gatherers might eat berries, snails, and rabbit one day and mushrooms, fruits, and mammoth the next, they were rarely malnourished. They got all the nutrition they needed from the variety in their diets.
Less Disease
Aside from hunter-gatherers’ food choices, many factors contributed to hunter-gatherer health. Many diseases afflicting Sapiens’ descendants came from domesticated animals. Because their only domesticated animal was the dog, there was less opportunity for the spread of disease.
Additionally, hunter-gatherer populations were spread thinly across the land. Epidemics were uncommon. Later societies would live in close quarters and unhygienic environments, fueling the spread of dangerous epidemics.
Aside from healthy hunter-gatherers’ food choices, foragers had many advantages over their descendants.
Short Working Hours
It’s very possible that early hunter-gatherers spent much less time working to find food and resources. Many of them lived in lands much more fertile than the Kalahari Desert. They also didn’t have the chores that take up our time today, like vacuuming, paying bills, and washing dishes.
We Don’t Know Much About Hunter-Gatherers
Because foragers moved every week, sometimes every day, they had few personal possessions. They only had what they could carry themselves, without the aid of wagons or pack animals. Consequently, Sapiens during the period between the Cognitive Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution left few artifacts. Dependence on the few artifacts discovered creates an incomplete and even misleading picture of our ancestors.
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Here's what you'll find in our full Sapiens summary :
- How Sapiens outlived and outlasted the 8+ other human-like species on Earth
- The 3 critical revolutions in human existence that led to our domination of the planet
- How much of what powers our world today is really just a shared mass delusion
- What the future of humanity might look like
