I merely wanted to point out that until recently, it was thought that 
Neanderthals in Europe ate only meat from large wild game such as 
mammoths - and it was also wrongly suggested, at the time, that the 
Neanderthals died out due to this lack of variety when the larger mammals 
died out. However, in recent times, it's been pointed out that the 
Neanderthals in Europe did in fact have a very varied diet including lots of 
seafood and plants and nuts and even small game, not just meat from the 
larger land-mammals:-

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/human-origins/neanderthals-
diets/index.html

Part of the problem is that plants are invisible in the fossil-record as they so 
easily deteriorate by comparison to bones which  fossilise relatively easily, the 
result being that there is an exaggerated focus on meat-consumption by 
hominids in the Palaeolithic era.

Geoff


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On Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:58:27 -0600, Ken O'Neill <[log in to unmask]> 
wrote:

>The article Eat Like a Neanderthal which I provided links to (2 parts)
>yesterday is coauthored by a nutritionalist and an anthropologist; the
>latter specializes in ancient diets, evidence for which is found both in
>prehistoric garbage sites and fecal matter set to stone. One conclusion to
>that article is that as humans spread throughout the world, nutrition was
>consistent with their environment. Added to that, glacial ages profoundly
>altered diet - northern continents immersed in ice, parts of Africa
>partched. In the long haul, there was never something one can call a
>standard, uniform Paleo diet.