But if you're an athletic/lean hunter/gatherer with very little body fat, and you're burning 3500 calories a day and winter is coming and you don't have much subcutaneous fat, you're going to face some dietary problems if all you ever eat is fat-free meat. You're not sitting on your ass all day shoveling down fried potatoes - you're on the go, doing physical work, lifting and carrying and gathering and hunting. There's no large-scale production of grains and seeds, so all you get is what you can gather, and it's just not enough calories to keep you and your family fed all winter long. That means you have to get fat from somewhere else--so you have no choice but to go up against a woolly mammoth or aurochs or whatever--and you and your caveman pals risked their lives in the process, because big wild herd animals are mean as hell. But it had to be done--it was the best way to get a lot of nutrients in a great big parcel.

So yeah, the stuff that was really nutritionally important was probably kind of hard to get.

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Corn is what you feed pigs and cows to fatten them up for slaughter - that was enough to turn me off of it for a while. Until, yk, mid-summer, butter and salt & pepper.

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