In modern times, many people flock to historically-based diets and food recipes to simultaneously connect with the past and become healthier in the present. Surviving recipes from the world's oldest civilizations will now occasionally make it onto modern tables, while the food-related tools that revolutionized early civilizations, like the grain quern, are being reexamined by experimental archaeologists and foodies alike.
One of the most common history-related food fads is the paleo diet (and, by extension, its more extreme cousin, the carnivore diet). This diet suggests that people today should up their meat intake under the premise that prehistoric humans ate a diet primarily based on hunting. However, a new study from the site of Gesher Benot Ya'akov in Israel calls this theory into question.
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The Cutting-Edge Research On Paleolithic Plant-Based Diets
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Researchers from multiple Israeli universities have just made an incredible discovery: that humanity's early ancestors actually had a more plant-based diet than pop culture assumes. According to a paper published in 2025, these experts, including Hadar Ahituv, Amanda Henry, Yoel Melamed, Nira Alperson-Afil, and Naama Goren-Inbar, discovered rare remnants of plant matter and pollen found on prehistoric tools.
The data came from the site of Gesher Benot Ya'akov, a prehistoric settlement on the banks of Lake Hula in northern Israel. This site is roughly 780,000 years old, and has 20 layers of human occupation. Many amazing finds have been found here, including preserved animal bones, but what was most important for the researchers of this team were tools made from basalt. On these tools, the researchers found remnants of plant matter and pollen. These plants were identified as tubers, nuts, roots, acorns, cereals, legumes, water lilies, and water chestnut.
What these findings told the researchers was that plants actually played a far more important role in prehistoric people's diets than what most people believe. While meat was still an important part of their nutrition, hunter-gatherers from prehistory actually relied heavily on plants for their food, with starch-rich plants (like tubers) being of vital importance.
Another plant-based archaeological discovery was just made in Israel near the site where Jesus was crucified.
Paleolithic Plant-Based Diet Findings
Site:
Gesher Benot Ya'akov
Age:
780,000 years BP
What plant residue and pollen were found on the basalt tools from this site?
tubers, nuts, roots, acorns, cereals, legumes, water lilies, and water chestnut
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What Are The Paleo And Carnivore Diets?
In modern times, many people feel disconnected from the food that they eat. They buy their food from a supermarket without knowing where it comes from or eat food prepared by someone else at a restaurant. For some, this is satisfactory, but others yearn to return their diets to what humans ate before the advent of civilization. From this desire was born the paleo and carnivore diets.
The paleo diet is a diet that prioritizes meat and vegetables. It removes all processed foods from a person's food repertoire, such as dairy, grains, sugar, legumes, oils, salts, alcohol, and beverages. The basic premise of the paleo diet is that humans have not actually evolved to eat these foods yet and thus should abstain for health purposes.
While some advocates for the paleo diet try to maintain a balance between meats and vegetables, many high-profile practitioners emphasize meat far more than vegetables, leading to a public conception that the paleo diet is primarily meat-based. This is a similarity that the paleo diet has with the carnivore diet.
This other famous diet postulates that prehistoric humans almost exclusively ate animal products, such as meat and eggs, and suggests that modern people today should cut out all foods that are not these two things.
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How Do The Paleo And Carnivore Diets Compare With Archaeology?
Lentils like these were commonly eaten throughout humanity's prehistoric past, even going back as far as 780,000 years ago based on finds from Israel
While both the paleo diet and the carnivore diet suggest that they're recreating the diets of humanity's earliest ancestors, the truth is far more complicated. Archaeological evidence has shown that prehistoric humans ate a varied diet that was constrained to the environments in which they lived.
However, certain aspects of prehistoric human diets discovered through archaeology don't quite fit the paleo diet profile (and especially don't fit the carnivore diet). For instance, prehistoric humans actually did rely heavily on carbs. Tubers and roots, which are high in carbohydrates, seem to have been an important part of a prehistoric diet based on studies like the one from Gesher Benot Ya'akov. Likewise, the cereals and legumes that this diet forbids have also been part of the human diet for hundreds of thousands of years.
The paleo diet also does not account for the fact that bread is far older than what most people believe. While the paleo diet maintains that bread was first developed in response to the agricultural revolution, the creation of bread dates back to at least 30,000 years ago.
Archaeologists know this because of paleolithic grinding stones that have been found across continents, in places like Eurasia and Australia (the fact that this invention is so widespread may even indicate that the invention is far older than the evidence we currently have).
Grinding stones are specifically used to make flour from cereals and other plants. Flour is not good to eat on its own, which means that paleolithic people used that flour for something. The easiest answer is that they were making some kind of bread.
Although grain processing could have convergently been invented by multiple groups, the presence of flour (from local plants, such as maize and acorns) in the Americas before colonization may also suggest that the technique was invented prior to the initial settlement of those continents (currently dated to at least 21,000 years BP based on the White Sands Fossil Footprints, but is likely closer to 30,000 years).
Carnivore diets in particular often cite the presence of animal bones at human kill sites to claim that meat made up most of the human diet. However, what this really means is that plant-based refuse simply doesn't survive as well as bones. In arid, hot environments, like Israel, plant-based matter survives better, giving archaeologists a clearer picture of prehistoric humans' diets.
Likewise, many of these diets are based on the diets of specific modern hunter-gatherer cultures, such as the !Kung and the Inuit. Although studying the diets of modern hunter-gatherer peoples can be important for researchers, something to remember is that these modern groups live in very harsh environments. Hunter-gatherer groups in the prehistoric Middle East or the woodlands of North America would have had a far more varied diet due to food availability.
None of this research indicate that the paleo diet is inherently bad. Far from it! For many people, these diets help them become more in touch with their food and help them have more control over their nutrition. This research doesn't take that personal significance away. What this research does indicate, however, is that the paleo and carnivore diets are actually modern diets with loose inspiration from prehistory.