On Tuesday, July 22, 2003, at 10:14  PM, Keith Thomas wrote:

> What sort of balance would humans have been
> able to practice in the Pleistocene?  Plentiful, tasty fruit on odd
> days
> in autumn,

I agree with your opinions except this point. Fruit, depending of
course on your environment, would have been available from late spring
to late fall, even into the winter. Here where I live now, cherries are
first, in mid spring, followed shortly after with strawberries. In
early summer there are plums, raspberries, followed in July by
blackberries. The different fruits just keep coming in season. Even in
late fall and winter there are fruits to dig out of the snow and eat
frozen. We used to eat late apples and pears that way as kids. Some
fruits like wild apples and grapes etc are only good after a frost.

If you stretch it to include all edible wild fruits, it is quite a
variety, and not just in the fall at all. In more tropical climes there
would have been even more. I expect that even meat eating hunters would
have gathered wherever fruit was ripe, to hunt the animals attracted
there, as well as to eat the fruit themselves.