Wally Day wrote:

>Third, it's quite possible some early humans happened upon plants and
>animals that could have perished in a wild fire. Oooh, easy pickings. And,
>perhaps, not too bad to eat :) This last one is based on pure providence,
>and doesn't even assume fire was "invented" first. In fact, it could
>explain the compulsion to eventually tame fire (I want some more of that
>barbequed caribou :)
>
>
I think that's probably pretty close to what happened. I think this
"low-heat cooking" however paleolithic diet, is very unpaleolithic. See
krosenth's  18th Century Apache diet post. I think that style of
cooking, throw it into a fire until it's done, was one of the more
common ways of cooking.
Here's my Duck recipe:
Skin one duck and rip it into hand-sized pieces.
Pile some hay or dry grass up about 1 foot to 18 inches high throw duck
into grass.
Light.
Pile on more hay so that the pile burns about 10 minutes.
Let it burn out. Fish out the chunks. Mmmmm... black on the outside,
juicy and tender on the inside!

Barry