What did hunter-gatherers eat

Before diving into exactly what hunter-gatherers ate, it’s important to understand who they were. As the name suggests, a hunter-gatherer is someone who survives by hunting animals and gathering wild plants for food. This lifestyle didn’t include farming for several reasons. The first is they didn’t have a metal strong enough to create effective farming tools, and the second reason would be the lack of how to actually grow your own crops. This meant hunter-gatherers lacked farmed crops and the many products derived from agriculture—like plant oils, processed grains, and fibers such as linen.

For most of human history, hunting and gathering was the dominant way of life. Agriculture only became widespread comparatively recently—around 10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic Revolution. It wasn’t until the early Iron Age, starting roughly 800 BCE in Britain, that farming began to overtake hunting and gathering as the most common way to obtain food. The reasons were simple: agriculture supported larger populations, allowed people to settle in one place, and ensured a more consistent food supply. As societies grew, the pressure on local wildlife increased, making hunting less reliable and more resource-intensive. Farming, for all its labor, provided a solution that hunting alone could not match.

When Did Hunter-Gatherers Live?

The earliest stone tools date from around 2.5 million years ago and have included spearheads and knives, but as for modern-day humans, the history of hunting and gathering societies started as soon as there were people, or whoever modern-day people evolved from at least. During this time the world would have been very different, sea levels would have been much lower and the population would have been tiny, with the global population in 2000 BCE estimated at under 30 million people.

This would mean an enormous amount of wild land complete with its range of plants and animals who flourished in the rich wilds and all completely untouched by mankind and its creations. This is how people could survive living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the first place as animals would have massively outnumbered humans and fish populations would have next to no one reducing them.

What they would have eaten exactly would depend on where in the world they lived, but for the purpose of this answer, I will use hunter-gatherer societies in the British Isles during the early Iron Age as an example, which started around 800 BCE.

What Did They Eat?

Hunting Animals

Hunting was a group activity, often involving spears, bows, and later in history, slings and traps. The primary targets were medium-to-large herbivores such as red deer, roe deer, wild boar, and aurochs (a now-extinct type of wild cattle). Smaller game like hares, squirrels, birds, and beavers also featured in the diet, especially when larger prey was scarce.

Evidence from archaeological sites across the British Isles confirms the widespread consumption of these animals. Bones bearing tool marks and charred remains from ancient cooking fires have been found in numerous prehistoric settlements.

While carnivores like bears and wolves also roamed Britain, they were rarely eaten. Predatory animals tend to carry more parasites and diseases, and modern medicine, or anything that could even be loosely connected to the word “medicine” didn’t exist, with the risk of illness from consuming meat from predator animals so high, they were mostly just avoided. These animals were more commonly hunted for their pelts or killed for safety reasons rather than as a food source.

Gathering from the Sea

Seafood was a crucial part of the hunter-gatherer diet, especially for coastal communities. It provided a steady, year-round source of protein that required less effort than hunting. Early settlements often clustered around estuaries and shorelines for this reason.

Shell middens—mounds of discarded shellfish remains—can still be seen around parts of Britain, especially in Scotland and Ireland. These sites offer insight into ancient diets and food practices. Shellfish such as limpets, cockles, mussels, winkles, and crabs were commonly eaten. Scallops and oysters were rarer due to the difficulty of harvesting them without diving equipment.

Fish were also highly valued. Using spears, traps, and sometimes primitive nets, people caught salmon, trout, pike, perch, and flounder. These were usually found in shallow rivers, lakes, and coastal shallows. Unlike many land animals that were later introduced by civilizations like the Romans (who brought rabbits to Britain), the native fish populations have remained largely consistent, though modern fishing practices have greatly reduced their numbers.

Wild Plants and Grains

Plant foods played an essential role in the hunter-gatherer diet, especially during colder months when hunting was less fruitful. The British Isles were rich in edible wild plants, many of which are still foraged today.

Berries like blackberries, elderberries, and hawthorn were available in late summer and early autumn. Nuts, particularly hazelnuts and acorns, were vital sources of calories and fats. Acorns, although bitter and inedible raw due to high tannin content, could be leached in running water to remove the bitterness, then dried and ground into flour—a staple for winter storage.

Leafy greens, edible roots, and flowers were also gathered, including nettles, sorrel, wild garlic, burdock, and primrose. These were eaten fresh or sometimes cooked into simple stews. Some wild grains—like barley and rye—grew naturally and were collected before farming became widespread. Wheat, however, was likely introduced from the Near East during the Bronze Age.

Food was seasonal, and people adapted to what was available. Spring provided fresh greens and shoots; summer brought berries and soft fruits; autumn was the time for nuts and grains. Winter diets relied more on preserved foods—dried meat, nuts, and stored acorn flour, for instance.

While we can piece together the hunter-gatherer diet through archaeology, the full picture will always remain partly speculative. Much of the plant matter they consumed has long since decomposed, leaving limited direct evidence. What we do know is that their diet was diverse, seasonal, and heavily influenced by local ecosystems.

Hunter-gatherers were skilled in using every available resource in their environment. Their diet wasn’t just about survival—it required deep knowledge of nature, careful observation, and efficient methods for processing and preserving food. In many ways, it was a sustainable way of living that modern societies could still learn from.

Hunter-gatherer cooking methods

During the bronze and iron ages, people could make metal cooking pots which allowed them to boil things, which was the preferred method of cooking meat. Roasting chunks of meat on a stick over an open fire was the easiest method, but archeological digs around the country have revealed time and time again the use of cooking pots, which suggests it to be the preferred method.

Since no one had any kind of written language in the British Isles during the Iron Age, there are no records of any kind that detail how people cooked their food, so we can only speculate as to how they would have done this. One interesting find from central Europe shows evidence of a ground oven dating back to around 29,000 BCE, but these kinds of finds are extremely rare due to the evidence not being able to survive in most conditions for thousands of years.