To clarify: modern science estimates 300–1000 species in gut microbiota, 99% by number of cells coming from 30-40 species. The total number of microbial and viral cells throughout a healthy adult body is estimated at over 100 trillion, or roughly 10x the number of one's own body cells.
I want to get beyond the boring "too much of anything is bad". Of course it is! That's what "too much" means!
Well, have fun!
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/08/24/5456315...
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/hadza-hunter-gatherer-gut-micr...
Paleolithic archaeological sites are full of marrow-scraped bones and the stone tools used to kill and butcher. Paleolithic teeth have little of the damage associated with eating grit from ground grains. We have such remarkable discoveries as a building made entirely of mammoth skulls.
The Hadza are a modern people, and modern hunter-gatherers have been pushed to the fringes. Early English and French explorers documented the diets of the North American people they encountered: they ate a lot of meat, growing the Three Sisters as a supplement to a diet heavy in game and fish.
It was the Neolithic in which population pressure forced people to start eating grain, and eventually growing it. They immediately became shorter and their teeth started falling out.
> Paleolithic archaeological sites are full of marrow-scraped bones and the stone tools used to kill and butcher.
That's only because all the archaeologic evidence is preserved in bones and tools. All if not most of the plant based evidence has been reclaimed by nature. There are some new discoveries surrounding preserved pollens that are showing how early hominids had plants in their camps.
> We have such remarkable discoveries as a building made entirely of mammoth skulls.
That's because all the wooden based structures didn't survive. We should quit calling it the Stone Age and call it the Wood Age, because their stone tools were used to build wooden structures (along with butchering critters).
Maybe I should have worded it better... "realize that our Paleolithic friends ate more plants than we were lead to believe"
Paleo goes a bit beyond that, to be fair.