Around 10,000 years ago, most humans ate a diet dominated by wild animal meat, supplemented with foraged plants, nuts, shellfish, and, in a few key regions, the very first cultivated grains. This was the early Holocene, a pivotal moment when the last ice age had recently ended and some populations were just beginning to experiment with farming while most still lived as hunter-gatherers. The diet was diverse, physically demanding to obtain, and looked nothing like what we eat today.
Meat Was the Primary Calorie Source
For the vast majority of human groups 10,000 years ago, animal foods provided the bulk of daily calories. An analysis of hunter-gatherer societies worldwide, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that 73% of these groups derived more than half their energy from animal sources, with typical ranges falling between 45% and 65% of total calories. Only about 14% of hunter-gatherer societies got most of their energy from gathered plant foods. This doesn’t mean plants were unimportant, but meat, fat, and marrow were the caloric backbone of most diets.
The animals people hunted varied by region, but in Europe and the Mediterranean, the most commonly targeted game included red deer, wild boar, and aurochs (a massive, now-extinct ancestor of modern cattle). Smaller animals like hares and foxes also appeared at archaeological sites, along with birds and reptiles. Isotopic analysis of human bones from this period consistently shows high levels of meat consumption, with terrestrial herbivores and omnivores making up the most frequent prey.
Coastal Populations Relied on Shellfish and Fish
People living near coastlines added a significant marine component to their diet. On Mediterranean islands, limpets and other rocky-shore mollusks were the most commonly harvested seafood, collected by hand from intertidal zones. Fishing was practiced but remained a secondary activity for most of the early Holocene. At sites in southern Greece and Sicily, dusky grouper bones appear alongside mammal remains, and some communities briefly scavenged meat from stranded whales.
Shellfish gathering has deep roots. Archaeological evidence from South Africa shows systematic shellfish harvesting dating back 60,000 to 70,000 years, so by 10,000 years ago, coastal foraging was a well-established practice. As the Holocene progressed, marine resources became increasingly important in some regions, with fishing and bird hunting expanding in the centuries that followed.
Wild Plants, Seeds, and Tubers
The plant side of the diet included wild seeds, nuts, roots, tubers, and seasonal fruits. Grinding stones, used to crush hard seeds and fibrous plant material into something edible, have been found at sites across the world. These tools were critical for turning tough, starchy foods into forms the body could actually digest. In Australia, grinding stones were especially important for processing grass seeds and hard-cased seeds in arid environments. They also made food accessible to infants and elderly people who couldn’t chew tough raw plants.
Acorns were a widespread food source in temperate regions, though they required leaching to remove bitter tannins before eating. In East Asia, people at the Shangshan site in China’s Yangzi River valley were already using rice as a dietary staple around 10,000 years ago, alongside other starchy plants like Job’s tears and lily bulbs. These weren’t yet fully domesticated crops, but they were being intensively managed and processed.
The First Farmers Were Just Getting Started
Around 10,000 years ago, in a crescent-shaped region stretching from modern-day Israel through Syria, Turkey, and into Iraq, people began deliberately planting wheat and barley for the first time. These two grains are considered founder crops of the agricultural revolution. The wild ancestors of these plants had been gathered and eaten for thousands of years before anyone thought to cultivate them, but this period marks the shift from collection to intentional farming.
In Mesoamerica, a parallel process was underway. Between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago, people in the Balsas River valley of southwestern Mexico began intensively using teosinte, the wild grass that would eventually become maize. Early teosinte was nothing like modern corn. Its kernels were small, its cobs tiny, and you couldn’t make tortillas from it. The transformation from teosinte to recognizable maize took thousands of years of selective planting. Meanwhile, early Mesoamericans also foraged squash and other wild plants.
It’s important to understand that farming didn’t replace hunting overnight. For centuries, most communities blended strategies, growing small plots of grain while still relying heavily on wild game and foraged plants. The full dietary shift to agriculture-dependent eating took millennia.
Early Fermented Drinks
One of the more surprising discoveries from this period is evidence of beer. At the Shangshan site in China, pottery vessels dating to roughly 10,000 to 9,000 years ago contained microscopic traces of rice starch, yeast cells, and a specific mold called Monascus, all signatures of deliberate fermentation. The Shangshan people brewed a rice-based beer using a starter culture, combining rice with other grains, acorns, and lily bulbs. This represents the earliest known alcohol fermentation technique in East Asia, and it coincided with the early stages of rice domestication. The production of fermented beverages appears to have been one of the first uses people found for their new pottery technology.
How This Diet Shaped the Body
The shift from hunting to farming had measurable consequences for human health. In Europe, average male height dropped from about 174 cm (5’8½”) during the earlier Upper Paleolithic to around 164 cm (5’4½”) by the Mesolithic, the period just before and overlapping with early agriculture. Height only partially recovered, reaching about 167 cm (5’6″) by the Bronze Age, thousands of years later.
Bone density also declined significantly as farming replaced hunting. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that genetic markers for bone mineral density dropped sharply from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic period. Skeletal measurements of leg bone strength tell the same story: a significant decline once people became more sedentary. The likely explanation is that farming required less daily movement than tracking and killing wild game. Hunter-gatherers walked enormous distances, carried heavy loads, and engaged in bursts of intense physical activity. Early farmers, by comparison, stayed closer to their fields.
The hunter-gatherer diet of 10,000 years ago was high in protein, rich in wild plant fiber, and almost entirely free of processed carbohydrates. Early farming diets, by contrast, concentrated heavily on one or two starchy grains. This narrowing of the food base, combined with reduced physical activity, appears to have made early agricultural populations shorter, lighter-boned, and in many cases less robust than their foraging ancestors.