Ray, thanks for your detailed posts on this, it's clarified a lot.  But
I'm still puzzled by a few things (mainly because I know nothing about
the timescale of human evolution or climate change) if you have time to
explain them.

On Jul 05, 2004, at 11:39 pm, Ray Audette wrote:
> Modern domestic animals get the gene for storing fat from the
> Pleistocene
> Megafauna that they are the sad remants of ( as are we ).  Any
> creature that
> could survive an Ice Age winter needed large fat deposits.  Humans
> living in
> what are now near-tropical regions (then permafrost) would encounter
> such
> animals in such large herds that finding fresh carcases would be an
> everyday
> occurence ( just follow the vultures you future falconers).

Does this mean that humans were once much fatter than we are today, or
that we survived by eating regular high-fat foods?  Aside from the
Innuit, we seem a pretty lean species.  I have, though, often wondered
why people struggle to go without meat for more than a day (although I
have never really put myself to the test).  I always assumed that we
evolved to live off big but infrequent kills (as some African tribes do
today).  If mammoth carcasses were really so common, I'm surprised that
early humans weren't obese by our standards, given how easy it seems to
overeat on fat.  I must be missing something.

> Just as a bison harvested in fall provides enough fat to render most
> of the red
> meat into Pemmican ( 80% or more saturated fat),  so a mammoth would
> provide even
> more - perhaps as much as a ton.

Are you saying that humans have been preserving food for many thousands
of years?  (Indeed, is this where our taste for salt comes from?)

> The lean wild animals we find today are a result of our warmer climate.
> They were of little consequence for most of our existence.
> The wild remants of Pleistocene Megafauna live mostly in Arctic regions
> where the traditional people who live there enjoy the highest
> saturated fat
> diet of any people known.  Camels, lamas,cows, pigs, sheep, horses and
> other
> domestic animals all have their origins in Pleistocene Megafauna.  They
> could not survive our current climate without us - or us them as
> symbiosis
> always involves mutual dependence.

I have to confess I don't understand this at all.  Cows seem quite
happy to eat grass all day long with no interference from humans.  I
see how we benefit from these lean animals (we eat them) but not how
they benefit from us.

> Loren Cordain has commented about this on the paleodiet list and to me
> privately.  But for the inherent deficiencies in Omega 3 fatty acids
> found
> in commercial animal fats, his views on saturated fats, I feel, have
> softened.

This is what has caught my eye the most.  I have been feeling for a
while that I need to eat more fat, but I am reluctant to because of the
poor quality of domestic meat.  Has the saturated fat been a classic
case of misinterpreted correlation- ie, do we observe people eating
high amounts of saturated fat getting ill actually because they are
also eating only small amounts of omega-3 fats?  I eat wild salmon when
it's on sale, but no more than once a week.  I don't want to stuff
myself full of walnuts the rest of the time hoping it will compensate
for the obese cows and pigs I eat.

> Although hominids evolved in tropical areas, humans are temperate
> animals
> ( megafauna hominids).  This is evidenced by our lack of immunities to
> tropical diseases tolerated by tropical primates such as Herpes B and
> HIV
> and parasites such as malaria and tetse fly.

Again, I am lost.  How have humans become temperate animals (so
quickly) if we evolved in the tropics?  Evidentally something drastic
happened to change our skin colour as we left Africa, but this doesn't
explain why African people aren't still "tropical" and immune to the
tropical diseases.  And other primates have apparently survived the ice
age without losing their tropical status.

Ashley