>I don't read about the dietary variety of
>paleolithic dieters except on this list. From what I have seen, the
>variety is underwhelming.

When I referred to "paleolithic dieters" eating a huge variety of foods, I
was careless in my phrasing, because I was referring to people following
Neander Thin and similar systems.  There are a hundred different kinds of
fruits and vegetables and meats you can eat on such a diet.

In _The Paleolithic Prescription_ Eaton et. al. did state that most
hunter/gatherers actually eat a -greater- variety of foods than most
westerners.  More penetrating analysis by other researchers seeems to show
that even though most hunter/gatherers do eat a wide variety of foods, on
average meat makes up slightly more than half the diet and the rest is
usually a variety of different foods, but the variety is by the day, not by
the meal, i.e. meat + some berries today, meat + some nuts tomorrow, meat +
some wild pears the next day, and so on and so forth.  Apparently it's not
the usual pattern to eat fifty different things in a day, but during a
period of a year there will be considerable variety.

Of course there are exceptions, such as the Inuit and high desert
Aborigines who just don't have much variety available to them.  And of
course we would expect that hunter/gatherers living in really lush
environments with a whole lot of different available foods would have more
variety every day; I suspect hunter/gatherers living in the middle of the
Amazon jungle probably get more variety than your average Australian
hunter/gatherers.

I have yet to see it satisfyingly documented that humans actually -need- a
wide variety of foods for health.  I personally do not seem to feel the
need for a lot of variety; I'll go a week or three at a time on nothing but
red meat with a little olive oil-based mayonaise.  I found Stefansson very
inspiring in this regard.