[AlotOfReading]

This topic always becomes an ideological football in public discussions. Nevertheless...

The article completely misstates the purpose and findings of the paper, which isn't being helped by the authors here. The position taken in the paper is much less extreme. To summarize, they're staking out a position that middle paleolithic foraging groups were primarily carnivorous, but still had some level of dietary plant consumption.

The theoretical contribution is a bit more interesting, and the key line is in the abstract:

> We conclude that it is possible to reach a credible reconstruction of the HTL without relying on a simple analogy with recent hunter‐gatherers' diets.

The context here being that a perennial problem for the carnivorists has been that almost every foraging group we've documented ethnographically is highly omnivorous (see their rebuttel in 3.1). They're trying to get away from this problem by saying "all of that evidence is irrelevant because lower and middle paleolithic foragers were different". This is an understandable position in general, but specifically tying it to carnivorous dietary reconstructions requires running a gauntlet of theoretical objections, which is why the paper is essentially a long list of retorts to objections.

Personally, I don't find the argument convincing. There's a lot of weasel words to escape having to justify positions they really ought to littered throughout. It suggests the argument they're advocating isn't fully developed yet

e.g.:

> If genetic adaptations to USOs consumption were rather recent, it *suggests* that USOs did not previously comprise a large dietary component.

It's not a particularly well-argued paper, but this article is just a terrible summary of what it says.

[mpweiher]

> completely misstates the purpose and findings...primarily carnivorous, but still had some level of dietary plant consumption.

That's exactly what the article says, so not sure why you're saying it completely misstates the purpose and findings.

[AlotOfReading]

Are you saying that your initial reaction to the headline ("For 2 million years, humans ate meat and little else") and first line ("...hyper-carnivorous “apex predators” that ate mostly the meat of large animals") was to note the obvious corollary that "There is little argument that Paleolithic diets were higher in plants than recent Polar diets..."?

Since the whole point of science communications is communicating nuanced ideas without perpetuating misunderstandings, the fact that discussions here are reflecting the former rather than the latter is what I mean.

[mpweiher]

> initial reaction ... Polar diets...

Nope. Because the article doesn't talk about polar diets and polar diets are not on my mind otherwise.

Thinking about it for 3 seconds, a "mostly" meat diet doesn't seem at all at odds with being higher in plants than a polar diet, which I gather is pretty much exclusively meat-based.