A Photographer’s Quest for People Who Eat Like Their Ancestors

Matthieu Paley traveled to remote communities around the world in search of the origins of what we eat.

This article has been updated since its original publication on September 4, 2014.

These days, documenting our dinners for the Internet is a universal pastime: sharing your food means that you don’t dig into your plate until you’ve taken a picture of it with your phone and posted it to your social networks.

We embraced this form of photography for our story, “The Evolution of Diet” in the September 2014 issue of National Geographic magazine. Photographed by Matthieu Paley and written by Ann Gibbons, the story traces the food our ancestors ate to see what we could learn from them for feeding two billion more people by 2050.

What Matthieu and I learned in our story research is that early humans adapted to live off the land regardless of how harsh the environment

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