According to the Times’s Sunday Styles section today, there are people (specifically: 10 people) who call themselves “cavemen” or “paleos” who live in the city, but try to replicate in diet, exercise, and other lifestyle choices, the caveman lifestyle. They eat raw meat and leap around barefoot through the brush. They hate vegans, and judge each other for not being extreme enough cavemen. They have a “chieftain” named John Durant who makes them jerky from his deer organ-meat-holding meat locker. They only have one cavewoman, whom they presumably share. Here is what the Times found out about these people:

First, the basics:





“The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture.”



That’s not very weird. So far it just kind of sounds like Atkins. But what kind of treadmills do these cavemen prefer?





“These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.”



Can we watch them do this in Central Park one day, please? (Preferably with a real mastodon.) But, to be fair to the cavemen, at least they’re probably a total joy to hang out with,right?

That’s not very weird. So far it just kind of sounds like Atkins. But what kind of treadmills do these cavemen prefer?





“These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.”



Can we watch them do this in Central Park one day, please? (Preferably with a real mastodon.) But, to be fair to the cavemen, at least they’re probably a total joy to hang out with,right?



“Upon visiting Mr. Durant’s apartment for the first time, in August, Mr. Averbukh scowled at a tomato plant on his host’s roof deck.

Meow! “Cavemen don’t eat nightshades.” They sound like the biggest assholes in the entire world! But wait! Here’s another weird thing they do!:



So are they going to kill themselves at age 35 or what? The suspense is killing us!

Anyway, one of them eats only raw grass-fed beef, sometimes with a fork. And they all work on the internet (online advertising, web managing, running a design-based e-commerce site.) Oh, and one last thing about the cavemen, without which the Times’ Margaret Mead-ing would not be complete:



Of course they do! Someone should tell them that real cavemen didn’t carry around worn copies of Atlas, Shrugged. We really just want to know what neighborhood these Cavemen live in so we can stay out of it. (We’re going with two extremes: either Bushwick or Murray Hill.)

The New Age Cavemen in the City [NYT]