No, it's not the work by Lee that I got that from. It was from more recent work that was global in perspective. I'll have to go look, but it was years ago.

As for the game animals eaten, that also varied very much by locale. The European HGs mostly ate big game.

Yes, I know the kinds of animals eaten did indeed vary very much by locale, as they still do today. People in some countries eat scorpions, rats, bats, horses, cats, dogs, snails, snakes, lizards; people in other places don't. In Japan, raw fish and seaweed are common/daily fare. In other countries, not so much - or at all.

Sorry, I find it hard to believe that European HGs (or HGs anywhere else) mostly ate big game, and that big game was the main calorie source. There is a huge tradition in many countries in Europe such as France, Spain, Greece and Croatia of eating wild animals - and foraging, trapping and hunting them - like rabbits, wild boar, all sorts of small birds and various wild fowl, snails, frogs and all sorts of fresh and saltwater fish and crustaceans like minnows, mussels and crabs. Europeans also have longstanding traditions of foraging for non-animal foods.

But whatever Europeans did, the fact is that Europe is not indicative of the rest of the world. Asia, Africa and the Americas are larger than Europe in land mass and population.

Regardless of locale, relying solely on big game for the main source of calories would not only be incredibly inefficient, but it would be hard for the average tribe to butcher and consume and digest an entire big-game animal before the meat went bad. Prior to the era of curing/salting meat preservation, the chance of becoming incredibly sick or dying of food poisoning from meat gone bad would have been high. Flies and maggots are pretty quick to set upon a rotting animal carcass; same goes for buzzards and other vultures.

Also, anyone who's spent any time outdoors in the wild knows that the natural world is full of tiny, small and medium-sized critters, some of which are fairly easy for humans to catch, trap or fish or whose nests, burrows, breeding grounds and homes are easy for sharp-eyed humans to find, stake out and raid. It makes no logical sense to think that HG societies in all of Europe - or anywhere else - would routinely pass up all the opportunities to catch and eat the vast majority of creatures smaller than them within their reach and instead concentrate solely on hunting and eating big-game many times their own size.

HG people weren't stupid at all - so why would they not make use of their main advantages over a huge array of other animals - their human size, senses and smarts - and choose instead to only go after big-game animals who were vastly larger and faster, and could crush humans under their hooves?

The kinds of animals eaten around the world, many of which come from practices and customs that predate agriculture and animal domestication, are incredibly diverse. Yes, sometimes big game is eaten. But most of the land animals and fish eaten everywhere on earth are of small or medium size. For every tribe/people that focused on the likes of antelope, whales, bison/buffalo, there had to be dozens more that relied on insects and small or medium game and fish for animal calories.

Of course, latitude matters. People in tropical climates have different options than people who live in places with falls and winters. But in cold climates, a lot of animals are actually easier to stake out and catch in the fall and winter months. Once the weather turns cold, many rodents and insects look for warmer places - such as indoors or near fires. And other animals burrow in and hibernate.

It doesn't make sense that humans in cold climates would pass up the opportunity to eat all the critters coming into their tents or caves once the weather chilled coz of their supposed allegiance only to big game. It doesn't make sense that humans would ignore the chance to raid the nests or burrows of all the animals lying low for the winter.

It's been proven time and again that starving, hungry people even in the modern world will eat virtually anything - leather shoes, cockroaches, the flesh of other humans - to survive. So it seems preposterous to say that HGs would turn up their noses at all other animal food sources coz of their supposed allegiance to only eating big game.

I'm from North America, the US specifically. Big-game clearly wasn't the main source of animal meat calories by the Native Americans on the east coast that were first colonized by Europeans. Otherwise, the centerpiece of Thanksgiving wouldn't be turkey - it would be moose, elk or venison from other deer, or perhaps coyote or wolf. And there'd be no oyster stuffing, a New England seashore Thanksgiving classic.

The idea of the primacy of the male big-game hunter wielding a phallic spear is male-supremacist. My hunch is, a lot more critters and calories were captured by use of traps and nets devised, engineered and woven by women.