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Scientists have hit out at the so-called 'caveman diet' - pointing out that early humans simply ate what they could to survive, the Daily Mail reported.

The paleo diet is a weight-lose craze where calorie-counters pick plants and animals they think early humans may have eaten.

But researchers warned early humans did not live for as long as modern mankind and dieters needed to consider the long-term effects of any specific diet.

In fact, early humans ate very much like modern pigs and bear and were 'simply acquiring enough calories to survive and reproduce.'

And although cream cakes did not exist in our ancestral diets, 'our ancestors would have eaten them if they grew on trees.'

It said hunter-gatherers in cold northern climes would have had an almost exclusive animal-derived diet but those living near the equator would have eaten more plants and fruits.

While early hominids were not great hunters, and their teeth was not great for exploiting many specific categories of plant food, they were most likely dietary 'jacks-of-all-trades.'

The new research showed ancestral diets differed substantially over time and what early humans ate was almost certainly much broader than now.

Dr Ken Sayers, a postdoctoral researcher from Georgia State University, said: 'Throughout the vast majority of our evolutionary history, balancing the diet was not a big issue.

'They were simply acquiring enough calories to survive and reproduce.

'When you're trying to reconstruct the diet of human ancestors, you want to look at a number of things, including the habitats they lived in, the potential foods that were available, how valuable those various food items would have been in relation to their energy content and how long it takes to handle a food item.

'Based on evidence that's been gathered over many decades, there's very little evidence that any early hominids had very specialised diets or there were specific food categories that seemed particularly important, with only a few possible exceptions.

'Some earlier workers had suggested that the diets of bears and pigs - which have an omnivorous, eclectic feeding strategy that varies greatly based on local conditions - share much in common with those of our early ancestors.'

The review paper published in The Quarterly Review of Biology covers earliest hominid evolution, from about 6 to 1.6 million years ago touching on the beginning of the Paleolithic era, which spans from 2.6 million to roughly 10,000 years ago.

But Dr Sayers suggested that the conclusions hold in force for later human evolution as well.