Alright, so I was casually scrolling through the blog, and couldn’t help but notice the Venus of Willendorf. As an archaeology student, I of course had to read what certain people had to say about “cavemen” and their dietary habits.

I could honestly go on and on about this, but I’ll just stick to some facts.

1. “Cavemen” (honestly just call them early humans) did not have prescribed diets or trackable systems of consumption like later civilizations, specifically Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome. With the availability of a much greater amount of sources those civilizations and their nutritional tendencies can be much more easily interpreted and predicted based on social classes, weather/famine patterns, and military history. If one was to look at ancient sites, such as Ohalo 2 or Amud cave, hardly anything is actually preserved. Therefore, it is only truly possible to see the trends and effects of a proto-human diet on their bones.

2. Speaking of bones, try and imagine the incredibly small amount of early human remains that have been found throughout the world. If you’d like, you could visit the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History to see the Neanderthal exhibit, where one individual is represented by a single bone. She did from an overdose of Vitamin A, which was concluded to have been from eating the liver of an animal.

3. It took a very long time for early humans to begin to “cultivate” crops. Realistically they took plants from outside of caves (see Amud cave) and put them inside. They were hunters and gatherers, and therefore scavenged for their food. We’re going to ignore what you may have learned about division of labor and whatnot within these early societies because it’s irrelevant. What you need to know, is that the life of an early human was spent surviving. If meat was available, it may have been cooked, it may have not. Starvation and malnutrition were not uncommon.

4. It is impossible, false, and without archaeological evidence to infer that early humans had the capability to collect any food that was not relevant to basic survival, let alone create a store of food to draw from to do so. There wasn’t fast food, there weren’t snacks. There weren’t naps or weekends. It is impossible and erroneous to create a connection between the food patterns, nutritional tendencies, and athletic necessities, to that of now.

Let’s be honest, I could go on. How could you possibly think that you could compare what you call a caveman to a modern human being? We aren’t even the same species. Why are you using your so-called scientific knowledge to try and shame people who are different than you? Do you realize that you’re actually glorifying the “caveman”?

Because, really, let’s take a look at you. “Cavemen” didn’t have iPods, or cars, or McDonalds. They also didn’t have a guaranteed life expectancy, or yoga class, or jobs where they got to sit behind a desk. They lived every day as if it was their last, because they could have died from anything, anything in their constantly-changing environments, at any moment. Everything they did was just for survival. And I highly, highly doubt, that even though you can fit into a smaller pair of jeans, or maybe your blood pressure is a little lower, or magazines and popular media say that you’re more “pretty” than someone else, you yourself, by simply weighing less than other human beings in this world, can justifiably be placed on the same mental, social, and physical level as the early human species.

And maybe you’ve been told yes all your life. Maybe you think that your constant abuse of people who look different than you and grasp of what you believe is scientific fact can justify your opinions. I’m not even going to get into how I feel about you having the audacity to say that to another human being. But how dare you, how dare you exploit history and science for your own purposes? Just because you want to be able to point at some part of the world, some point in the human timeline, and say “Here, I’m justified, this is something that didn’t happen then” doesn’t mean that you’re right in doing so. It doesn’t mean that that’s how things are now. There is an innumerable amount of things that no longer happen or exist from any time period of the world.

And honestly, I am ashamed that someone at my age or around it could fool themselves into believing that this is a valid way to justify their unfounded prejudices.

tl;dr Modern humans and their nutritional capabilities cannot be compared to early humans in order to substantiate the idea that we should hold our society to the same “weight standards.”