I have several comments to make on several subjects under discussion.  I
lost my modem 5 days ago in an electrical storm (unplug your modems during
lightning!) and am catching up on messages.

In the meantime, I read Neanderthin and really didn't care for the author's
tone and attitude and some blatant misinformation...but I still think it's
a good idea.

Just like The Zone and the Blood Type theory.  The people that have
poo-pooed the Blood Type theory clearly *have not read the book.*  D'Adamo,
and his father before him, have done research for 30 or 40 years on this
topic.  No blood type is suggested to be "a vegetarian" but rather
different types tolerate or thrive on different amounts and types of
different foods.  Type As could be vegetarians if they wanted to but can
also thrive on poultry and seafood (as opposed to red meat).  Just an
example.  I'm not here to defend D'Adamo's theory or the Zone theory but to
suggest none of us should bad-mouth anybody's theories until we have read
their books and checked the research cited ourselves.

I think it is interesting that the Blood Type and the Zone theories back up
the Paleo-eating theory.

On another topic -- drying fruits -- I grow or forage for most of my own
food (and have for many years) and have found drying one of the most
efficient ways to preserve food for long cold winters.  I use my homemade
solar dryer -- here in Northern VT -- or the oven of my propane stove with
the pilot light on (it's about 95 F).  Homemade solar dryer is basically a
wooden box with shelves and mesh racks with an old storm window cover.
Whole thing is painted black and aimed at the sun with a tilt to agree with
your latitude.  If anyone wants more info, they can email me privately.  A
good food preservation book is Putting Food By that gives directions for
canning, freezing, drying, pickling, etc of protein foods as well as fruits
and veggies.

As a maple syrup producer I also think that hunter-gatherers probably drank
sap from trees.  Many different kinds of trees produce a sweet sap and
trees could have been accidentally, then deliberately, punctured with a
sharp stick and the resulting sap drunk.  The sweet sap is available only
in early spring when very little food other than animal sources are
available for consumption and would have been a welcome harbinger of the
sweet berries and fruits to come. They clearly didn't boil the sap into
syrup until containers were available for such an operation.

Jane