Men have been eating more meat than women for the past 10,000 years

A recent study shows that European men have been eating more meat than women for the past 10,000 years.

Gentlemen eat more red and processed meat than recommended in modern Finland. Their appetite for meat is nothing new under the sun, a recent study shows.

According to the results, European men have eaten more meat than women for the last ten thousand years, and more the higher their position.

“Our results show that there has been persistent inequality in animal protein intake over the past 10,000 years,” researchers report in the scientific journal Pnas Nexus.

Thus has been speculated before, but according to the researchers, their study produced extensive quantitative evidence of the phenomenon for the first time.

The researchers measured nitrogen and carbon isotopes in the skeletons of 12,281 adults from more than six hundred European sites. Nitrogen indicates meat and carbon indicates the proportion of vegetarian food in the diet.

In pre-industrial European societies, meat was a highly sought-after food, and its availability often depended on social status.

The researchers found that in all eras, men formed a clear majority among those who consumed the most meat.

According to the researchers, the increased proportion of women among those who ate the least meat points to the limited availability of animal proteins. It confirms previous anthropological findings that the shortage hit women more strongly.

The researchers speculate that the differences may have stemmed from food taboos and religious beliefs, misconceptions about women’s protein needs, or social norms that put men’s needs ahead of women’s.

“However, our data show that these inequalities are not universal. In about five percent of the sites studied, women had a preference for animal proteins,” the French-Canadian team writes.

Stone Age the early agricultural societies of the late 19th century were the most egalitarian of the societies studied, but they also had significant gender differences in animal protein intake.

The diet seems to have been fairly uniform throughout Europe in the Late Stone Age. After farming began, eating fish decreased elsewhere than in the areas along the Danube, where water grains were still eaten.

Conformity ended in the Bronze Age. The increasing complexity of economic and political systems – including the emergence of states – appears to have increased wealth disparities from the Bronze Age onwards, particularly in northern Italy, Greece and eastern Europe.

In the Bronze and Iron Ages, lower-ranking men ate less meat and more millet than their superiors. On the other hand, regardless of their social status, women ate less of both animal protein and millet than men.

Some too at times and in some cultures, social class and age differentiated diet more than gender. In ancient Rome, men and women of the same social class ate together. In Hellenistic societies, gender differences were greater.

From the Bronze Age onwards, meat became a luxury item reserved for the upper class anyway.

The differences in nutrition reflected in the bones were at their peak in the Iron Age, Antiquity and the Late Middle Ages. According to the researchers’ guess, they reflected eating practices differentiated by social status and possibly the return of fish to dining tables.