> I’ve heard that humans had a long period of time after we became sedentary and started relying on agriculture that the average height decreased significantly, and it was only in recent centuries that it has gotten back to normal due to more varied nutrition. So even if you can technically survive on a very limited diet, it can still have negative effects.
It's not the variety of the diet but the quality of the food itself. Bread is good for energy, but if all you're eating is bread, you're not getting complete proteins, omega 3s, and other nutrients. It's fine, however, to eat nothing but meat and many societies did this for hundreds of thousands of years.
Farming is anything but sedentary, especially in the 19th century and prior. People's height was stunted because food was not abundant enough. Agricultural societies tended to grow faster than farming productivity could keep up with. A lot of people were simply malnourished and therefore never reached their natural height capacity.
But as you say, the hunter / gatherers such as the native Americans were taller on average than the first European settlers to arrive in America. This is not due to a particularly diverse diet. Most cultures subsisted on meat from hunting (largest source of nutrition) and a select few vegetables. The difference is that hunter / gatherer societies tended to self regulate their population according to available resources.
I think it's false. Hunter gatherer communities (no societies back there) lived by what they could find - either hunt animals or look for fruits, plants and mushrooms.
Then there was a shift towards agricultural societies, where people relied on their plantations and domesticated cattle. I don't think the cattle meat would be enough for most of their meals, probably the most of them would be bread and soup.
This is just a vague recollection from A Brief History of Humanity, but it makes sense to me. Eating just meat sounds terribly "costly", you have to actively ignore all other sources of food around you.
Even ancient hunter gatherers probably ate a diet of more (wild) plant than meat. Catching animals is hard work, with the technology of the time.
But in general, I think we know a lot less about the lives of people so long ago than many people (including academics) like to think. Research methods are often based on either assuming modern people's lifestyles are "just like" ancient people, or big leaps from extremely limited archeological evidence.
No, of course they didn't. They lived in the Ice Age. Edible veggies and nutrients were extremely sparse and hard to come by for 1M years. Also wild plants prior to cultivation were not these big beautiful tomatoes, apples, bananas, and cucumbers we see in the grocery stores today. Those plants were selectively bred for thousands of years to produce what you see today.
Grass-eating bison, aurochs, horses, goats, sheep, etc were our primary source of nutrition in the ice age, not to mention mammoths (as well as fish).
And this is evidenced by ancient cave paintings tens of thousands of years old depicting hunts as well as the bone remnants in the caves and homes of ancient humans.
But mostly what the conflicting theories with consensus that changes from generation to generation tells me is that it's very hard to know for sure how people 15K+ years ago lived.
So really all societies did this until the advent of agriculture ~10K years ago. And even then, the agricultural revolution was not evenly distributed and hunting or fishing as a primary source of nutrition was common even just 150 years ago.
It's not the variety of the diet but the quality of the food itself. Bread is good for energy, but if all you're eating is bread, you're not getting complete proteins, omega 3s, and other nutrients. It's fine, however, to eat nothing but meat and many societies did this for hundreds of thousands of years.
Farming is anything but sedentary, especially in the 19th century and prior. People's height was stunted because food was not abundant enough. Agricultural societies tended to grow faster than farming productivity could keep up with. A lot of people were simply malnourished and therefore never reached their natural height capacity.
But as you say, the hunter / gatherers such as the native Americans were taller on average than the first European settlers to arrive in America. This is not due to a particularly diverse diet. Most cultures subsisted on meat from hunting (largest source of nutrition) and a select few vegetables. The difference is that hunter / gatherer societies tended to self regulate their population according to available resources.