In an 8th grade social studies class, our teacher told us that early American explorers, real Grizzly Adams types, would drink a steaming cup of hot fat in the morning due to their rugged athletic lifestyle. Was Mr. Jager yankin’ our cranks?
Main Entry: pem.mi.can
Function: noun
Etymology: Cree pimihka[^.]n
Date: 1791
Variant(s): also pem.i.can /'pe-mi-k&n/
: a concentrated food used by No. American Indians and consisting of lean meat
dried, pounded fine, and mixed with melted fat; also : a similar preparation (as of
dried beef, flour, molasses, suet) used for emergency rations
Mmmm, Pemican bars. Had a couple of the commercially packaged version while hiking in New Mexico. Tasted like sweet cardboard and sturdy enough to build a house out of. Kept me going until lunch though.
Paleolithic men after hunting only chose the choicest parts of the big game to bring home, the fattiest cuts they could carry. The lean meat was left to rot on the corpse.
Geez, give someone else a chance to post.
Seriously, thanks Muffin.
My grandfather used to have bacon fat sandwiches. In the past it looks like we consumed more fat. The problem came about w/ the ‘explosion’ of processed carbohydrates (soda, cereal, etc.) IMHO
Cite?
Preferably contemporary. 
OK, it ain’t paleolithic, but ca. 1900, blues singers in Mississippi would specifically request meat cut from the fat of the pig or cow.
The reason: they could then drink as much whiskey as they wanted, and the rate of absorption would be slowed to the point that they could still sing and pick competently.
Cite: “Chasing That Devil Music” Gayle Dean Wardlow. (The edition I have has a CD with recorded interviews of sources. One interviewee (Booker Miller) describes witnessing blues great Charley Patton do this very thing).
There was a travel book written by Paul Theroux a few years back, about his travels in a sea kayak around the south Pacific islands. One thing he commented on was that many of the native people in small island countries had adopted very cheap low quality canned meat as a dietary staple. This would be the canned spam/corned beef kind of stuff, imported. In the hot climate the stuff in the cans, low quality with a high fat content, would be essentially liquid when opened. This indicates to me that there are lots of people on south Pacific islands today that basically sit around eating warm liquid fat out of cans with a spoon.