The true paleo diet packed a crunchy punch with insectsShutterstock / Marcos Castillo

There is a cliché in journalism where you say that something or other “is having a moment”. In 2024, Sabrina Carpenter released Espresso and suddenly she was having a moment. Right now, the cast of Celebrity Traitors are all having a collective moment.

For much of the 21st century, entomophagy – the eating of insects – has been having a moment. The first edible insect farm opened in the US in 2014, and many have followed its example. Insects are high in protein and there is evidence that farming them produces fewer greenhouse gases than conventional meats (alongside other environmental benefits). Magazines like New Scientist have run countless stories about edible insects. Insect-based food companies have launched to enormous buzz (sorry, not sorry).

Yet entomophagy hasn’t really taken off (again, not sorry). While edible insects are commonplace in many cultures, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, nowadays they are falling out of favour. In Europe and the US, they have long been viewed with disgust.

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Western culture reflects this. Try to think of an example of a fictional character eating insects. Did your mind instantly go to the vampire’s familiar Renfield in Dracula, endlessly chowing down on creepy-crawlies while also serving his evil master? Or maybe the, er, let’s go with “problematic” dinner sequence in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?

The thing is, this cultural belief that insects are gross is just that: cultural. There are insects you absolutely shouldn’t eat because they carry diseases or are poisonous, but many others are safe and nutritious. As I said, plenty of societies use insects as food.

How far back does this practice extend? When we talk about prehistoric foods, we often focus on large mammals like deer or mammoths, or cereals like wheat and barley, or – if you go back a few million years – grasses and sedges. We don’t often talk about Neanderthals or Homo erectus munching on crickets. But maybe we should.

Crunchy

Our evidence about prehistoric entomophagy is partial and scattered. That is partly because archaeologists haven’t often actively searched for it, says Lisa-Marie Shillito, an archaeologist at Durham University in the UK. “We don’t always recognise things that we’re not looking for,” she says. Insect remains are often found on archaeological sites, but often “people just assume it’s contamination or pests”.

Some of the best evidence comes from fossilised human faeces, known as coprolites, which can contain bits of insect exoskeleton and other traces. Unfortunately, “they’re not routinely collected in the same way that other artefacts are”, says Shillito. “They can be surprisingly hard to recognise” and may be mistaken for lumps of clay. Only a handful of researchers specialise in coprolites, including Shillito. “I’m kind of known, I guess, as being the expert in ancient poo.”

Shillito has now brought together a lot of evidence about insect-eating in prehistory in a synthesis paper published in World Archaeology on 27 October.

The first thing to note, Shillito says, is the practice is “really geographically widespread”. Some of the best evidence comes from the Americas, where coprolites have been more routinely studied. Shillito highlights Paisley caves in Oregon, which has evidence of human presence from around 14,300 years ago: one of the oldest such sites in the Americas. In 2020, she and her colleagues studied coprolites from the caves and found evidence that people were eating, among other things, insects.

Specifically, “big juicy ones”, says Shillito. These included ten-lined June beetles (Polyphylla decemlineata), which grow to almost 3 centimetres in length. The team also found the remains of Jerusalem crickets, which is an inaptly named group since they aren’t crickets and don’t come from Jerusalem. They are related to the oversized wētā insects of New Zealand, albeit not quite as large. “If you’re hunting and gathering, they’re quite meaty-looking things that you might just pick up and eat,” says Shillito.

The ten-lined June beetleShutterstock / GypsyPictureShow

A more subtle piece of evidence comes from the Bonneville Estates Rockshelter in Nevada. A coprolite from this site contained the eggs of parasitic worms called acanthocephalans. These parasites use insects and other arthropods as intermediate hosts – so the person who was infected may well have eaten insects.

On the other side of the world, at Cloggs cave in Australia, researchers have found evidence of Aboriginal Australians eating bogong moths (Agrotis infusa). These moths migrate in huge numbers every year, and it seems the Indigenous peoples took advantage of this. A grindstone from the site had the remains of ground and cooked bogong moths from about 2000 years ago.

There is also evidence that people were using bees as a food source thousands of years ago. In Nigeria around 3500 years ago, farmers and foragers lived alongside each other. A 2021 study of pottery vessels from the Nok culture found that many of them had telltale lipids. This reveals the people were eating honey or other items from beehives, perhaps including bee larvae. Likewise, in Egypt there are pottery vessels with traces of beeswax from at least 8000 years ago.

So far, all these examples have been from the relatively recent past: the last 20,000 years. But our species has been around for 300,000 years, at least, and human evolution spans 7 million years or more. Were our more distant ancestors eating insects too?

Om nom nom

Non-human primates eat insects tooShutterstock / dvphotoworld

The first thing to say is that non-human primates, which are our closest living relatives, absolutely eat insects. A 2012 review found it was a common behaviour and that non-human primates tended to go for insects with a high protein-to-fat ratio – suggesting that insects are a significant source of protein for them. This hints, though of course doesn’t prove, that the most recent ancestor we share with apes also ate insects.

There is some evidence that this behaviour was carried through. In studies published in 2001 and 2008, two researchers – Lucinda Backwell at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and Francesco d’Errico at the University of Bordeaux in France – described bone tools found at sites in South Africa. They argued that the pattern of wear on the bones was consistent with digging into termite mounds. The tools are over 1 million years old and may have been used by Paranthropus, extinct hominins related to our genus, Homo.

Likewise, in a 2014 study in the Journal of Human Evolution, researchers compiled isotopic data from early Homo specimens, and from older Australopithecus. The mix of carbon isotopes found in the remains gives us a broad-strokes picture of what the hominins ate. It seems they were eating at least some animal material, and at least some of that may have been insects.

Some readers may also remember an intriguing study published in 2025. It re-examined isotopic data from the bones of Neanderthals. Because living organisms tend to accumulate the heavy isotope nitrogen-15, and lose the lighter one nitrogen-14, organisms higher up the food chain tend to have more nitrogen-15 than those at the bottom. Neanderthals have sky-high levels of nitrogen-15.

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One interpretation is that Neanderthals ate meat and little else: you could conclude they were “hyper-carnivores”. However, this doesn’t make a lot of sense, partly because eating just meat is dangerously unhealthy, and partly because there is plenty of evidence from other sources that Neanderthals had varied diets. So instead, researchers have suggested that Neanderthals sometimes ate the maggots that were feasting on rotting meat.

One of the authors of that study is Julie Lesnik at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. In her 2019 book Edible Insects and Human Evolution, Lesnik argues that insects are both abundant and relatively low risk, making them an ideal food source. She suggests that mothers could have safely gathered insects while also carrying their babies. Of course, that assumes women weren’t hunting large animals alongside the men, an assumption that looks decidedly shaky – but that aside, it seems a reasonable hypothesis.

Nevertheless, there is a huge amount we still don’t know about insects in prehistoric diets. “How important were they?” asks Shillito. “How did that change over time, and why, in different parts of the world?”

Insects were probably seasonal foods in many places, Shillito suggests. “They’re not around all the time.” This may help to explain why it is tricky to find hard evidence of entomophagy in the archaeological record. “We’ve got this tantalising evidence,” says Shillito. Now, she wants to look more systematically.

The obvious takeaway from all this is that everybody banging on about the so-called paleo diet needs to rethink. Less red meat, more grasshoppers and beetles. It’s (probably) what our ancestors did!

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Finally, let’s go back to where we started. In the past 20 years there has been a lot of coverage of the environmental and food-security benefits of eating insects. Yet, insect products aren’t supermarket staples, at least not where I live. If the wheel is turning, it’s only turning slowly.

That leads me to a book chapter by the entomologist Friedrich Simon Bodenheimer. He begins: “It has been known for many centuries that insects are eaten as delicacies in many parts of the world. Reports have come down from antiquity of insects, especially locusts, being eaten by primitive peoples. Honey has been known as a prized food from time immemorial. Yet entomophagy, apart from honey consumption, has always been regarded as a curiosity or as barbarism.”

Bodenheimer goes on to say that he began examining the subject “largely out of curiosity”, only to be taken aback by the sheer scale of entomophagy. “It is actually astonishing that the real and basic importance of insects as food for early and primitive man has been so long ignored.”

Savvy readers may have twigged from archaic terms like “barbarism” and “primitive man” what the punchline is going to be. Yes, this chapter is old: Bodenheimer published it in 1951.

We keep rediscovering the fact that humans have routinely eaten insects, and we keep being surprised by it. At some point, we should stop being surprised.