The “palaeo” diet bears little resemblance to the real thing

Herman Pontzer is eating a muffin. Over Zoom it looks delicious. A warm, brown, undulous exterior gives way to fluffy but squidgy, pale innards. It is a perfect example of all that modern capitalism has to offer in ways of processing food to sate primeval appetites.

Dr Pontzer is a professor of evolutionary anthropology and global health. He is an expert on what human beings consumed tens of thousands of years ago when they were hunter-gatherers. He knows they would never have eaten such things. But he knows, too, that there are many myths about what people did eat before agriculture was invented. And at a meeting at the Royal Society in London later this month he will explain that their diet was far more diverse than advocates of “palaeo” eating imagine.