Peter:
>The book does not speak much about diet but the where it does it has
>some very interesting perspectives. The two excerpts below are from p.
>203-206.

>"The first big sign that our ancient ancestors had begun to make the
>changeover to including meat in their diet comes with excavations of
>the archaeological sites of the 2-million-year-old ancestor Homo
>habilis.  One of the most famous places where this ancient ancestor
>plied its trade is Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, which is often called
>"the Grand Canyon of prehistory."...
>As attractive as this vision of our ancient ancestors=ED life was,
>however, archaeologists discovered evidence of a very different
>life-style when they began to look more closely at the stones and bones
>Homo habilis left behind.  Putting the bones under an electron
>microscope, researchers found that many of the ancient bones bore un-
>mistakable signs of cuts and gouges made by stone tools, in much the
>same way that a wooden kitchen cutting board is scored by the cutting
>action of a knife.  The cut marks are clear evidence that our ancient
>ancestors were using tools to cut the meat off the bones in the sites
>of Olduvai.

I saw on PBS a group of paleo-researchers stepping on animal bones laying
in some gritty sand--and the scoring was indestinguishable to the Olduvai
bones, they claimed.

>But while the powerful vision demonstrated that our ancestors were
>eating meat nearly 2 million years ago, it also revealed other marks on
>the bones that made the notion of our ancestors living like miniature
>boy Scouts at home bases a lot less likely.  Many of the bones bore
>scratch marks, for instance, that were made by the teeth of a
>carnivores such as hyenas, suggesting that animals other than humans
>also ate the bones at the Olduvai sites.

How about their hunting dogs?

>Other scratch marks on the
>bones revealed that, at least part of the time, our Home habilis
>ancestors were not hunting but scavenging for their meat.  On some
>bones, scratch marks made by stone tools cross over marks that had
>previously been made by carnivore teeth, and on other bones there are
>teeth marks that cross over tool marks.  Thus both carnivores and
>hominids appear to have eaten the same bone.  On about half these
>doubly cut bones the hominid made the cut first, suggesting that the
>carnivore got to the bones after the hominid discarded them.  On the
>other half, however, the carnivore tooth marks appear first, suggesting
>that our ancient ancestors had scavenged the bone from a carnivore kill
>site."

Or stepped on them or played catch with their dogs ;)

Glad to see you enjoyed Stone Age Present, Peter. Much of the reasoning
presented in the book is very much open to interpretation and is pretty
controversial in the field, but one doesn't get much sense of that from
reading it (which is OK to me--he was surveying new approaches). My above
comments are half tongue-in-cheek but only half: nearly every conclusion a
researcher comes to in paleo-anthro is terribly tenative. While there is no
doubt that there was lots of meat in most paleo-diets, there is still the
question of whether/when is was  being cooked and whether/when meat was
overeaten to detriment, at the very least.

The fat arguments (snipped) are interesting as far as they go, but what
about Eskimos and their high fat diet (or Aajonus' folks)? What about the
success of paleo-hunters: game may not have been all that scarce; fatty
portions were probably prefered (and less fatty stuff given to dogs? as the
Eskimos did); and organs (esp the brain) and marrow would probably have
made their diet anything but low fat in general. It may be that the
tripling of our brain size (relative to chimps) is nearly proof positive
that humans were successfully securing a high fat diet...blah blah

I'm not expecting threads on any of these bits at all--just wanted to make
the point that the _interpretation_ of evidence, esp paleo-anthro evidence,
is so varied that in the end, for me, it is a bit of a letdown as a source
of useful info. Nevertheless, I remain rivited by every new find and theory
and argument :/ ;)

And SAP is a delightful read--one which opens up new ways of thinking about
stuff--especially psych stuff, I thought. Things I probably would've
considered "neurotic" according to Primal may well be quite "normal" and
simply part of our evolutionary heritage. And SAP is the finest brief
presentation of Tit for Tat I've ever seen. It is indeed a must read,
especially for instinctos who are mostly familiar with Burger's version of
prehistory ;) For abit of a feminist version of evo-sexuality there is
"Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marraige, and Why We Stray"
by Helen Fisher.

Seems like I will be able to grow old reading the spawn of Desmond Morris'
"Naked Ape" as new evidence comes to fore and new theories are proposed in
this barrage of paleo-everysubjectunderthesun books...

Cheers,
Kirt

PS: Welcome to Lynton and Ed!