Well you almost knew that, what with the trend toward vegan and vegetarian lifestyles and all, some sect of cool kids would gravitate toward the other extreme if only to stand out from their peers. So now we have a small group of New Yorkers embracing cavemanism and, naturally, they were somehow unearthed by the New York Times’ Style section for a feature piece in Sunday’s paper.

So what exactly does cavemanism (my term by the way) entail? Well, according to the Times, modern cavemen “seek good health through a selective return to the habits of their Paleolithic ancestors.” One such caveman is John Durant, a 26-year-old who works in online advertising.

The caveman lifestyle, in Mr. Durant’s interpretation, involves eating large quantities of meat and then fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts. Vegetables and fruit are fine, but he avoids foods like bread that were unavailable before the invention of agriculture. Mr. Durant believes the human body evolved for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and his goal is to wean himself off what he sees as many millenniums of bad habits.

Hmmm…actually sort of sounds rather reasonable, no? But wait, you haven’t heard all there is to hear about the “paleo movement.” Things get sort of weird quite rapidly from here.

These urban cavemen also choose exercise routines focused on sprinting and jumping, to replicate how a prehistoric person might have fled from a mastodon.

Well, okay, that’s kind of not too weird. But what physical attributes do cavemen aspire to?

When Mr. Durant told a gathering of New York cavemen that he had seen Mr. De Vany at a seminar in Las Vegas, Matthew Sanocki, 34, asked if Mr. De Vany looked as muscular in the flesh as in pictures on his blog.

“He looks great,” Mr. Durant said. “You feel like he could, at a moment’s notice, charge at you and trample you.”

So what sort of workout routine does a caveman engage in in order to achieve that “charge at you and trample you” look?

One such figure, Erwan Le Corre, a Frenchman whom the magazine Men’s Health said “may rank as one of the most all-around physically fit men on the planet,” stopped by Mr. Durant’s while visiting the city in December. The men sealed their friendship with what both described as a bare-chested — and in Mr. Le Corre’s case, barefoot — run across the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges on a frigid night.

Mr. Le Corre, 38, who once made soap for a living, promotes what he calls “mouvement naturel” at exercise retreats in West Virginia and elsewhere. His workouts include scooting around the underbrush on all fours, leaping between boulders, playing catch with stones, and other activities at which he believes early man excelled. These are the “primal, essential skills that I believe everyone should have,” he said in an interview.

Oh, but wait, it gets better.

Andrew Sanocki, 38, a former Navy officer, explained that he preferred working out on an empty stomach near the end of a fast, and then following up with a large meal. This is a common caveman schedule, intended to reflect the exertion that ancient humans put into finding food. It is as if, Mr. Sanocki explained, “we’ve gone out and killed something, and now we have to eat it.”

Another caveman trick involves donating blood frequently. The idea is that various hardships might have occasionally left ancient humans a pint short. Asked when he last gave blood, Andrew Sanocki said it had been three months. He and his brother looked at each other. “We’re due,” Andrew said.

And naturally, the cavemen look upon vegans with great scorn.

They regularly grumble about vegans, whom they regard as a misguided, rival tribe. But much of the conversation is spent parsing the law of the jungle. The most severe interpretations generally come from Vladimir Averbukh, a jaunty red-headed Web manager for the city who was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Upon visiting Mr. Durant’s apartment for the first time, in August, Mr. Averbukh scowled at a tomato plant on his host’s roof deck.

“Cavemen don’t eat nightshades,” Mr. Averbukh, 29, said. He explained that tomatoes are part of the nightshade family, arguing that they are native to the New World and could not have been part of humanity’s earliest diet. Mr. Durant shrugged. (Mr. Durant said later that there was nothing uncavemannish about eating tomatoes.)

Oh, oh…CAVEMAN FIGHT!

It should be noted that there was one cavewoman mentioned in the article named Melissa McEwen. Since she and her paleo brethren seem intent on replicating every aspect of the prehistoric lifestyle, we can only assume that she routinely gets beaten with a club and dragged by her hair into a dark space where she is gang-raped repeatedly by the cavemen.

Banksy sketch via