What Native Americans Actually Ate Before Europeans Came

For Native Americans, putting dinner on the table was a terrifying, oftentimes death-defying, and always full-time job. While many of their foods aren't even around anymore, others have cropped up as trendy new dining options. This is what Native Americans ate every day before Europeans came.

While the Clovis likely weren't the first people to set foot on American soil, they were responsible for some of the earliest settlements, and they were such good hunters they've been blamed for the mass extinction of one of their favorite meals: The mammoth.

The rise of the Clovis does coincide with the downfall of the mammoths, along with other Pleistocene megafauna. Bones found across 19 Clovis sites suggest that while they were eating a lot of mammoth, they were also eating bison, mastodon, deer, rabbits, and caribou.

Their diet depended greatly on what was nearby, and megafauna seems to be the overwhelming preference. Clovis hunters in Mexico stalked the gomphotheres. As seen from this small section of a gomphothere jaw, they were massive, elephant-like creatures. They also went extinct during this period. In the far north they hunted something even more surprising: Camels. Camels roamed wide sections of what's now Canada, until the Clovis likely hunted them to extinction.

Watch the video for more about What Native Americans Actually Ate Before Europeans Came!

#NativeAmerican #Food

The Clovis | 0:00
The Folsom | 1:03
The Plano | 2:04
The Yurok | 2:55
Poverty Point | 3:42
The Anasazi | 4:32
The Hopewell | 5:45
The Oneota | 6:41
The Fort Walton Culture | 7:37
The Cahokia | 8:32
The Pueblo | 9:19

[GrungeHQ]

Would you have rather been a hunter or a farmer?

[theresareynolds]

I’m Native American and raised on a reservation, we ate squirrels, rabbits, deer, beef from our cows . We ate a lot of vegetables from the big gardens we had, we had chickens, fresh eggs food was good and we always had more than enough for everyone

[chaitanyareddymuthyala]

Lots of love to native Americans, from India, I get water in eyes, whenever I listen their history

[segwolfxviii]

There are tons of different kinds of natives and they all ate different things based on there culture.

[SP-qopd]

Being native, i can attest that for some reason our metabolisms go bonkers if you eat too much junk/fried foods. perhaps thousands of years with the same diet?

[DustyTheDog]

It was a member of the Potawatomi Tribe that introduced me to the Paw Paw fruit. It grows all over the part of Indiana that I was born, and the Potawatomi band is still active in Indiana. A nickname for the fruit where I grew up is "Indiana Banana", due to its resemblance of other bananas.

[johnbarber]

When you're hungry, you eat whatever is available.

[daBEAGLE]

My wife is Menomonee which translates to wild rice people. She eats hamburgers.

[MeLancer]

Very interesting. Good to hear that when Pueblos engaged in a trial where they ate only native foods, chronic health problems went away.

[Lantanana]

I have never believed that men on foot with spears could hunt an animal to extinction. I believe there were other forces that caused the extinction.

[johnjunge]

I'm a member of the Cahokia Mounds society. And it's pronounced "Ka- ho- kee-a".

[jimbrewer]

Dude, it's pronounced ka-HOE-kia, not ka-hoe-KIA. They lived in a part of Illinois where I lived. In elementary school we went on two different field trips to a state park called "Dixon Mounds" which when excavated turned out to be a Kahokia burial site. When the scientists were finished they left the remains exactly as they were found, built an enclosure over the entire site put in walkways and turned the whole series of mounds into a state park that was open to the public. We had some pretty cool field trips when I was in school but this one was by far one of the top 2 or 3.

[arkboy]

2:00 "Folsom hunted with bows and arrows..." NO they did not use bows and arrows, they used the atl-atl tipped with their famous projectile points. The bow comes around thousands of years later.

[EMTwombly]

Cahokia— ka-HOH-keya
Diets were a little more varied than you explained, but given your time format I can understand the glossing over the details of environmental differences and tribal differences made varieties in diet.

[hawk]

The mammoth was more than likely not hunted into Extinction. There is scant evidence for that hypothesis. It is more than likely that change in climate was at fault, given that there is more evidence for that than hunting.

[collinsfriend]

When I was in anthropology, they said the average food gathering work time for "primitive" peoples was about 4 hrs a day. There were many days they didn't work at all due to weather. Some days were full, and some days were not so busy, and game playing.

[heavymeddle]

I'm going to shoot from my hip here... But I have a strong feeling that they ate food

[davidjohnson]

Here in southern ontario, food native to this area are, plums, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, walnuts, peas, wild leek, carrots, sunflowers, cranberries, apples, 2 species of grapes, and popcorn

[josecontreras]

LMAO. These Europeans always tell you that the indigenous people disappeared when there descendants live nearby as they have lived for thousands of years.

Don’t let your enemy teach you your history.

Malcolm X.

[salfromtheval_xx]

A lot of tribes believe that pemmican, and there are other names for it, was their tribes sacred fuel, basically. It was what kept them healthy, strong, fit, cancer and disease free (especially stuff like diabetes which now plauges some tribes). Personally Im a Colorado River native and we have stories no longer than 150 years ago of long distance runners who could arrive to destinations several dozen, sometimes hundreds, of miles away faster than a horse or mule and in better shape. They had strict diets that involved mostly our own form of pemmican using local ingredients as well as strict physical restrictions. It was really just all the antioxidants, richness of nutrients, plus spiritual and physical discipline. Acorn was Chumash and other coastal natives sacred meat along with stuff like chia seeds, buffalo and berries to the plains .... certain ingredients certain tribes used all indeed scientifically proven to have awesome nutritional benefits. There was a lot of beneficial and environmental knowledge to everything we did and used because we had a time to learn our home before settlers came.