From Knowable Magaine, By - Diana Kwon, Edited by - Amal Udawatta What did people eat for dinner tens of thousands of years ago? Many advocates of the so-called Paleo diet will tell you that our ancestors’ plates were heavy on meat and low on carbohydrates — and that, as a result, we have evolved to thrive on this type of nutritional regimen. CREDIT: JAMES PROVOST (CC BY-ND) Evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pontzer Duke University The diet is named after the Paleolithic era, a period dating from about 2.5 million to 10,000 years ago when early humans were hunting and gathering, rather than farming. Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University and author of Burn , a book about the science of metabolism, says it’s a myth that everyone of this time subsisted on meat-heavy diets. Studies show that rather than a single diet, prehistoric people’s eating habits were remarkably variable and were influenced by a number of factors, such as climate, location and ...