Let me be clear – I do not mean that ancient hunter-gatherer peoples were vegans. Of course they weren’t, not in the spirit of the modern meaning of veganism where “vegans” are people who do not use animals and/or animal-based products.

But let’s look a little deeper. Veganism has just two aims – that animals are free, and protected from our cruelty and unfair use when we can do that. In other words, veganism is an ethical framework – a set of ethical principles based on the belief that other animals deserve our moral concern – which seeks to let other animals be free, have bodily autonomy, not be used unfairly and not treated cruelly, to the extent that’s possible.

If animals are owned and used for exploitative purposes, such as horses in commercial horse racing or trained animals in circuses or farmed animals for food and fibres, then clearly they aren’t free. So long as those industries exist, those animals will never be free. Withdrawing economic support – which is what vegans do – will not cause the animals to be freed but rather for fewer to be created by those industries. If those industries disappeared then no more animals would exist in those industries. The animals left in the world would be free. We should remember that by and large in the case of exploitative animal-using industries, the aim of veganism is not to “save” animals, but to prevent them existing in the first place.

Importantly, while vegan ethics propose that we shouldn’t eat or use animals when alternatives exist, if there are no alternatives it is quite permissible to do so. Vegan ethical principles do not demand that we starve to death rather than eat an animal.

Taking all of this together, it is clear that in ancient times, the wild animals in the world were all free. The humans that existed had few alternatives and eating and using animals was necessary. They simply did not have the knowledge, nor the reason, to adopt a hands-off approach to their relations with other animals. Were they cruel? Very probably, but within the context of the times perhaps understandable. The scale of cruelty in those times was many orders of magnitude less than we practice today.

In the end, ancient hunter/gatherers lived consistently with the aims of veganism to the extent that was possible or practicable for their time and context. Our ancestors were vegan, at least in the sense I have described. While they were not actual vegans, people today can be – or at the least, be guided in their choices by vegan ethical principles.