>In the Pottenger study, all the cooked food cats became sterile by the
>third(?) generation.  No adaptation took place.

Have very many other scientists ever tried to replicate the Pottenger's
experiment? Seriously, if it's really valid, I have always wondered how
there must be thousands if not millions of house cats survive on
store-bought cat chow for generation after generation. Would there not be
some sort of "cooking" involved in making that stuff? If not, you could
still hardly call it raw, as it is significantly processed. One study does
not "science" make. Has the Pottenger study ever been peer-reviewed or
replicated widely?

>>But since there has never been a time in hominid development where
>amimal foods did not play if just a small role in the diet, it would
>seem that they were also needed for their nutritional value.
>
>Really?  You could make a similar statement by substituting the words
>"alcoholic beverages" for "animal foods."  Would you still agree?

Alcoholic beverages in the form of wine from treading on grapes were
invented only around approx. 2,500 B.C. in the Middle East. [p.100 Scarre,
Chris (ed.) 1993 "Smithsonian Times of the Ancient World." New York:
Dorling Kindersley] Hardly even a significant fractional factor in human
nutrition until very recent times. It may be that sugary saps were obtained
by cutting the apex of sprouts of some plants for immediate consumption
hundreds of thousands of years ago, but it would not have been until
Neolithic times [circa 10,000 years ago] that alcholic beverages themselves
would have been produced in any but the most minute quantities. [(Forni,
Gaetano (1975) "The Origin of Grape Wine: A Problem of
Historical-Eocological Anthropology." In: Arnott, Margaret (ed.)
Gastronomy: The Anthropology of Food and Food Habits. Chicago: Aldine Pub.
Co.]

All that aside, however, it is curious why the above argument deprecating
the small role of meat in chimp and early hominid diet (or facetiously
arguing for the role of alcohol) is not also being similarly argued for
other items like nuts, flowers, bark, and anything else that composes only
a modest fraction of chimp or early hominid diet compared to fruit and
leafy greens. Why not throw these out too since they don't contribute that
much volume-wise to the diet? Yet no one is suggesting do that. I think
basic a-priori prejudice is distorting the logic here. Why not just throw
out the importance of the role of vitamin B-12 in the diet too, for
instance? We need hardly any of that. "Unless we ate a lot of it, we don't
really need it" doesn't seem like very firm logic to me.

--Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]> Wichita, KS

P.S.

Peter said (about the teeth microwear studies):
>In your references are they specific about what fruits are the mainstay
>of the chimp diet?

Since you were referring to the microwear studies, I am assuming you meant
to ask if specific fruits could be identified that were the mainstay of
ancient hominids 2-3-4 million years ago like australopithecus and homo
habilis.  Unfortunately, no. Microwear reveals basic *types* of food in
terms of the "wear" characteristics--such as wear from broad classes such
as fruits, flesh, fibrous plant matter, grass, bone, etc.,, but as far as I
know, microwear cannot indicate specific species of fruits and so forth.