On Mon, 13 Mar 2006 21:29:53 -0500, William <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Consider this scenario: cereal grain eating was a dirty trick foisted on  
>people by evil would-be tyrants.
>One idea for why people stopped eating paleo.

From the front jacket inside the book "The Long Summer" by Brian Fagan (2004):

" In The Long Summer, Fagan shows how a thousand year chill caused by the sudden
shutting off of the Gulf Stream led people in the Near East to abandon hunting
and gathering to take up the cultivation of plant foods."

I have not had a chance to read it cover to cover, but a skim shows it to be
fairly well documented by archaeological evidence (which is Fagan's field).

If you think about it, hunter-gatherer groups are small and the hierarchy has
loose control - it is only AFTER the change to stationary agricultural
populations that you then have kings who control thousands of people.   

So, it is extremely unlikely that any one person or any one group could cause
the entire species to change its eating patterns.   Note how difficult it has
been to get more than a fraction of the current population to adopt the obvious
immediate benefits of a low carbohydrate diet, despite its adoption by a large
segment of the show business celebrities (who use personal trainers whom survive
solely by the effectiveness of their programs).   Clearly, it would take a major
depletion of available food to get the majority of people to change their diet
of the previous 2 million years.

--
Cheers,

Ken