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Jack comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 2: Atkins Redux - Less Wrong
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Basically all hunter-gatherer societies, as far as I know.
Ah, that's reasonable, but could be just because food is more difficult to get, and exercise isn't optional.
The issue's a bit more complicated than that. Skeletal evidence shows us that overall nutrition is usually worse after the agricultural transition, with average heights (a decent proxy for nutrition) usually dropping by several inches after a region switches to an agrarian lifestyle.
This doesn't necessarily mean that agrarians are making fewer calories per unit effort, though. They may be limited in protein or micronutrients but not in calories, with stunting thanks to deficiency issues; actually that's rather plausible. Alternately agrarian methods might by limited by expenditure of effort during some limited season (plowing, say, or harvest -- I don't know exactly how bronze-age agriculture worked), which could give you higher peak effort but lower average effort. Or the aristocratic classes that usually come with an agrarian transition might be confiscating all the good stuff for their own use.
(Agrarians are making more calories per unit land no matter how you slice it, but that's more historically than nutritionally significant.)
The question was whether there were any non-hormonally obese people, not what the average person looked like. I'm pretty sure agriculture made it much easier for high status people to overeat. In fact, obesity was probably a status symbol.
What's weird is that agriculture-- or at least the modern food system apparently also makes it much easier for low-status people to get fat, even when their children are starving -- pdf.
Having children is not about reproduction, it's about locally high status ;)
Thanks for the paper.
The example is hunter-gatherers, not agriculturists. The point of discussing farmers is to address your suggestion that food is hard for hunter-gatherers to get. By many measures, it appears easier for hunter-gatherers than for farmers. In particular, hunter-gatherers appear to eat more and work less.
That's a harder question to answer, partly because fat doesn't preserve well in the archaeological record.
A quick trawl through Google Scholar isn't picking much up for the archaeological side of the question, although I've found a surprisingly large number of cites discussing the proportions of the apparently-obese "Venus" figurines sometimes found in Upper Paleolithic sites. This paper on the other hand seems to suggest that the answer is "no" for at least one group of modern foragers, at least to a first approximation (the sample size is rather small) and modulo the usual caveats re: modern foraging cultures.