[NotGMan]

This is wrong.

Humans have eaten complex carbs only for the last 10k years since agricultural revolution. Before that, outside of a small part of Africa, there physically wasn't enough carbs available to say that they made any substantial amount of our diet.

Most ancenstral carbs were uber high in fiber, and very low in glucose (starch) and fructose.

[DennisP]

I've taken courses in primitive wilderness survival, and one of the staple foods was grass seed.

Also lots of roots are edible with cooking, and it looks like we've been cooking for about a million years. Then there's wild rice, cattails, beans, berries, all sorts of stuff.

I agree that most wild plants are high in fiber and low in sugar, but there are are a lot of complex carbs to be had, if you have fire.

[NotGMan]

Interesting. So its possible to gather enough of these food to get eg ~200+g carbs per day (speaking in ancestral context, a tribe)?

Also how much must you eat of these to get enough in order to get enough digestable carbs due to the high fiber content?

[DennisP]

What's possible depends on where you are. But for example:

> Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist who studies modern-day hunter-gatherers, says traditional diets vary widely, and the vast majority of them include a high percentage of carbohydrates.

> For instance, the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer group in northeast Tanzania that Pontzer has studied for the past ten years, spend their days walking eight to 12 kilometers, climbing trees and digging for root vegetables. Their diet consists of various meats, vegetables and fruits, as well as a significant amount of honey. In fact, they get 15 to 20 percent of their calories from honey, a simple carbohydrate.

> The Hadza tend to maintain the same healthy weight, body mass index and walking speed throughout their entire adult lives. They commonly live into their 60s or 70s, and sometimes 80s, with very little to no cardiovascular diseases, high blood pressure or diabetes—conditions that are rapidly growing in prevalence in nearly every corner of the world.

https://globalhealth.duke.edu/news/what-can-hunter-gatherers...

And from another source:

> Because humans initially evolved in Africa, where wild animals generally lack appreciable fat stores (2), it seems clear that they consumed a mixed diet of animal and plant foods, given the apparent limitations of human digestive physiology to secure adequate daily energy from protein sources alone (4).

> Hunter-gatherer societies in other environments were doubtless eating very different diets, depending on the season and types of resources available. Hayden (3) stated that hunter-gatherers such as the !Kung might live in conditions close to the “ideal” hunting and gathering environment. What do the !Kung eat? Animal foods are estimated to contribute 33% and plant foods 67% of their daily energy intakes (1). Fifty percent (by wt) of their plant-based diet comes from the mongongo nut, which is available throughout the year in massive quantities (1). Similarly, the hunter-gatherer Hazda of Tanzania consume “the bulk of their diet” as wild plants, although they live in an area with an exceptional abundance of game animals and refer to themselves as hunters (18). In the average collecting area of an Aka Pygmy group in the African rain forest, the permanent wild tuber biomass is >4545 kg (>5 tons) (19).

> Australian aborigines in some locales are known to have relied seasonally on seeds of native millet (2) or a few wild fruit and seed species (20) to satisfy daily energy demands. Some hunter-gatherer societies in Papua New Guinea relied heavily on starch from wild sago palms as an important source of energy (21), whereas most hunter-gatherer societies in California depended heavily on acorn foods from wild oaks (22).

> In nature, any dependable source of digestible energy is generally rare and when discovered is likely to assume great importance in the diet. Animal foods typically are hard to capture but food such as tree fruits and grass seeds are relatively reliable, predictable dietary elements.

https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/S0002-9165(23)07053-3/ful...