Have humans always eaten meat? Is it natural?

The objection

“Eating meat is woven through human history. It sustained our ancestors, shaped cuisines and festivals, and is part of nearly every culture on Earth. It’s both traditional and natural, a practice this deep and this old can’t simply be wrong.”

The answer

Meat did help our ancestors survive, and food carries family and cultural memory that people rightly value. The objection makes two claims, that eating meat is old and that it is natural, and both are largely true. Neither tells you whether it is right to carry on now that most of us can eat well without it, and today’s quantities of meat are much newer than the tradition invoked to defend them.

Have humans always eaten meat?

Meat-eating in the human family goes back more than two million years: cut marks on animal bones at Gona in Ethiopia show early hominins butchering carcasses with stone tools between about 2.6 and 2.1 million years ago (Domínguez-Rodrigo et al., 2005) [1]. Today’s scale is recent, though. On the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s figures (FAO, 2025), the meat available per person worldwide nearly doubled from 23 kg a year in 1961 to 45 kg in 2023, a measure of supply that still counts what consumers throw away [2], and the number of chickens slaughtered each year rose from 6.6 billion to 78.5 billion between 1961 and 2024 [3]. The rise was uneven: China’s supply went from 3 kg to 74 kg a person over those years, while in the UK it was already 69 kg in 1961 and was 84 kg in 2023 [2]. Even in the UK, the number of chickens killed each year rose about sixfold, from 196 million in 1961 to 1.18 billion in 2024 [3].

Is eating meat natural?

It is natural for humans in the sense that we evolved as omnivores, but calling something natural describes it without showing that it is good. Disease is natural, and so, for most of human history, was losing children, yet no one defends the death rates of the past on the grounds that they were natural. In 20 studies of hunter-gatherer societies largely untouched by modern medicine, an average of 26.8% of babies died in their first year and 48.8% of children before puberty (Volk and Atkinson, 2013), and historical societies from ancient Rome to imperial China fared about as badly [4].

Has every culture eaten meat?

Most cultures have, and among hunter-gatherers animal foods were usually the mainstay: in the ethnographic records analysed by Cordain et al. (2000), 73% of hunter-gatherer societies worldwide got more than half their subsistence from animal foods and 14% got more than half from gathered plants [5]. Going without meat is an established tradition too, most visibly in India, where 39% of adults described themselves as vegetarian in a Pew Research Center survey of 29,999 people carried out in 2019 and 2020 (Pew, 2021), although most Indians do not give up meat altogether [6]. The figure was 92% among Jains and 44% among Hindus. Pew, which left the definition of “vegetarian” to the people it asked, notes that Hindu texts often praise vegetarianism [6].

Does a long tradition make eating meat right?

How long people have done something says nothing about whether they should go on doing it, and a long-standing meat tradition can be ended, partly for the animals’ sake. In January 2024 South Korea’s parliament voted 208 to 0 to ban breeding, slaughtering and selling dogs for meat, a practice the Associated Press described as centuries old on the Korean peninsula, after public calls for a ban grew over animal rights and the country’s international image (AP, 2024) [7]. The ban takes full effect on 7 February 2027, and by May 2026 South Korea’s agriculture ministry said 1,265 of the country’s 1,537 dog meat farms, about 82%, had closed [8]. Anyone who agrees that the custom’s age was no reason to keep it has already accepted the principle, and it applies to pigs and chickens as much as to dogs.

Our ancestors ate what kept them alive. For most people who can shop for food today, staying healthy no longer depends on meat: the British Dietetic Association says carefully planned plant-based diets can support healthy living at every age and life stage, with vitamin B12 from fortified foods or a supplement [9], and the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (2025) says appropriately planned vegetarian and vegan diets can be nutritionally adequate for adults [10]. People who still hunt or herd because nothing else will grow are a different case, set out in the answer on subsistence diets.