To that add the increased costs of logistics, because above some latitude you can only survive with a vegan diet with "exotic" produce brought to you with.. huge ass trucks.

The northerners did not all converge to meat eating diet out of taste, but because very few things grow up there.

I don't have the numbers but even then, 60% is simply funny.

Not true, commoner europeans ate bread, potatoes, beans. Meat and dairy was an exception. Vitamin C all winter was available from sauerkraut. Most deaths were not nutrition related, except for famines.

If you meant seal-hunting latitudes - these are only tiny part of population.

I would like to see you try to survive only on bread, potatoes, beans and sauerkraut.

Of course meat consumption was scarce, but necessary. And even so, people were malnourished back then by today's standards.

Cows have been kept for food for 10,500 years. Sheeps and goats for longer than that. Although the keeping of cows, sheeps and goats started in the Near East (specifically Asia Minor and the Levant), the people who started it migrated into Europe and after some time (probably less than 1000 years) constituted the majority of the European population. Virtually every farm in Europe kept animals for milk and meat at a time when most households were farming households. (The other households were hunter-gatherers, which kept on decreasing in number, who also ate a lot of meat, fish and shellfish.)

It is just not true that European commoners did not eat meat. Yes, for many centuries, the hunting of game was restricted to the aristocracy, but the amount of this game was always dwarfed by the amount of meat on farms (just as it is today for example in the US or Canada).

The Europeans of today are descended not only from these farmers that originated in the Near East and the original hunter-gatherer Europeans, but also from invaders from the East (particularly, where Russian and Ukraine are now). The most famous of these invaders are the Yamnaya, who invented wheeled vehicles and might have invented riding on horseback. These invaders were nomads and semi-nomads who relied heavily on meat and milk products.

Going back in time, from 115,000 to 11,700 years ago, glaciers covered most of Europe and about half of Asia. Below the glaciers was the largest ecosystem known to man, extending from Europe, over the Bering land bridge all the way to about where Kentucky is now. It is called the Mammoth Steppes. Only grasses grew there because those were the only plants that could survive trampling by the mammoths and other large herbivores (including the ancestors of cows). Humans could not eat the grass, and farming hadn't been invented yet, so they ate mostly meat. These humans were the ancestors of the humans mentioned earlier. We know from studies of carbon and nitrogen isotopes that humans living in the Mammoth Steppes derived most of their calories from animals that ate grass (because grass has a different effect on carbon isotopes ratios than other plants have). They might have eaten a lot of plant food, but if so that plant food contributed at most 20% of their calories (which is not surprising given how meager in human-usable calories most non-domesticated plants are).

Going back further in time, humans have been eating meat for about 2 million years. We know that because wherever we unearth human settlements from the last 2 million years, we usually find animal bones and the bones usually show marks consistent with stone tools' having been used to separate the meat from the bones. Since plant foods do not survive the way that bones do, we do not know whether humans have been eating plants for those 2 million years, but I concede that they probably have been, but again before the invention of agriculture about 11,000 years ago, it was really hard for people in most locations to get enough calories from plants to survive.

And how many of these meat eaters were? Not even millions.

I agree. I was responding to “commoner europeans ate bread, potatoes, beans. Meat and dairy was an exception.”