Paradise Lost?

I would hate for people to think that the paleo diet is about recovering some "paradise lost." Just because peasant agriculture was miserable for most people doesn't mean foraging was a walk in the part. Almost every foraging culture studied has a wide range of remedies for illness and medicine men are revered. Hunter-gatherers suffered from malaria, tuberculosis, parasites, wounds from wild animal bites, and all sorts of horrendous infections. 

The preferred medicine against diarrhea was clay, kaolin-like powders or pulverized bone ash while bee larva, certain tree barks and the fruits of two trees were eaten to relieve constipation.

But many detractors of the paleo diet point to studies of more modern hunter-gatherer cultures to draw out evidence they were ill. We have to remember that what is left on that lifestyle is people who were able to survive on the worst lands not coveted by farmers. The Inuit or the San diet might be healthier than most American diets, but neither is really similar to the diet of paleolithic people.

In Innu mythology, Matshishkapeu (literally the "Fart Man") is the most powerful spirit—even more powerful than the Caribou Master, Kanipinikassikueu. He proved himself when the Kanipinikassikueu refused to give the Innu any caribou to eat. Matshishkapeu was so angry that he cursed the Caribou Master with a painful case of constipation.

It's even possible we could do better. For example, both the high and low fiber diets of hunter-gatherers are touted as solutions to digestive problems, but digestive ailments clearly still plagued cultures eating both diets. Personally, I try to eat the vegetables that work for me and I don't worry about counting fiber. I'm pretty such that if I ate the bazillion grams of fiber the San eat, I would feel pretty sick. Maybe that's what anecdotes like this convey: there is lots of learn from hunter-gatherer and ancestral diets, but imitating their fiber consumption with BRAN4LIFE bread is on the same level as imitating snake bite wounds by keeping your own pet PALEOvipers. 

Despite all that hunter-gatherers suffered, the paleo diet is about avoiding diseases of civilization, and it seems they did that well. We should eat like them, but still with an eye to the fact that they ate what they could to survive. 

Postscript: I think many of the stomach problems attributed to hunter-gatherers were probably post-infectious or in the case of the Inuit, because of a lean time...literally...Vilhjalmur Stefansson found that without ample amount of fat, stomach issues ensued.