The modern "paleo" diet loaded with animal fat and protein is a modern invention that serves mostly to help people rationalize their taste preferences.
Paleo man definitely had access to multiple giant portions of meat a day -- just not every day.
After you kill the auroch, all that meat has to go somewhere.
Paleo man also ate the whole thing, not just the muscle meat. Some days, you might just have a giant bowlful of fat. Other days, you're eating paste made from acorns that have been leaching out their bitter compounds under a waterfall for a week.
Depending on where you lived, your tribe might have had access to many portions of meat every day for weeks, and then nothing but low-nutrition or semi-poisonous plants for months. It was a great incentive to develop either food preservation technology, agriculture, or a nomadic lifestyle. Which is to say: follow the meat, keep the meat from rotting until the herd passes through again, or eat more nutritious plants.
So there wasn't any one archetypal paleo diet. Paleo man had to adapt to his environment or die. The "paleo" idea is to reject foods that did not exist 10000 years ago, because supposedly human physiology hasn't evolved to deal with them yet. You invent a caricature of a cave man in your head and let him tell you what's food and what isn't.
~I don't recommend it. When I tried it, my cave man slipped on a wet rock while hunting, got a bad compound fracture, and died from an infection a week later, because antibiotics hadn't been discovered yet. My cave woman was out collecting sour berries and army worms, fell into a creek, and drowned. Then my cave baby was raised by wolves. I couldn't find the wolf milk and regurgitated caribou section in the supermarket, so I had to abandon the diet.~
It's difficult to know what the diet in the Paleolithic was but there is, I think, a component of the diet that we can be pretty sure about: occasional hungry. How we use that knowledge it's a different issue.
Not true ~ there is no "true" paleo diet ~ it varies vastly from culture to culture. Look at the Eskimos ~ their traditional diet was mostly animal, high in nutrients, protein, fat, and sugar in the form of glycogen, and very little in the way of plants. Then in other tribal cultures, they may subsist mostly on plant foods.
There's no One, True Diet. Veganism is actually rather unhealthy, because it excludes foods which contain highly bioavailable forms of nutrients not found in plant foods ~ Omega 3s, iron, etc.
An animal-based diet isn't unhealthy ~ it can be the most nutritious of all. Organ meats are extremely nutritious.
An animal-based diet isn't the problem ~ modern human societies run by greedy corporations and governments are, because they have created and supported the problems of animal abuse, because it is profitable.
> The modern "paleo" diet loaded with animal fat and protein is a modern invention that serves mostly to help people rationalize their taste preferences.
Bullshit. Paleo isn't all about fat and protein. That's keto. Paleo can be full of healthy carbs.
And the "paleo" diet most people eat is really just a rebranding of what people used to call the Atkins diet.
I feel the root cause of much of these issues is the practice of corporate farms to wall things off into atomic monocultures, and to separate animal husbandry from farming. I believe this is easier, for many reasons, but not more productive. It may be more economical, based on externalized pollution costs, and subsidized energy costs. I.E it has more to do with our arrangement of politics, rather than underlying fundamentals.
All one has to do is lookup bioavailable sources of iron.