Diane asked if paleo people ate honey or dried fruit.

The following are my speculations; others may have different ideas, but
here are mine to get the ball rolling.

My guess would be that paleos ate honey, but that it was a rare treat: bee
stings on bare flesh would be a deterrent and discovering bee hives would
be a rare occurrence.  Paleos would not have had honey available like we do
(day in, day out) but would more likely have gorged themselves on it three
or four times a year.  It would have been nutritionally insignificant.

Fruit would have been very different from the genetically selected
varieties we see on our supermarket shelves today.  For a start, they would
be much smaller (walnut sized apples and pears, for example), they would
h
ave been more fibrous, they would have been more bitter or pungent and
less sweet.  Also, they would have been available only in season.  That
means that apples would have been available for about a month and the next
eleven months would have been apple-free.

As to _dried_ fruit, I doubt it as they would have to have relied on sun-
or fire-drying and we just don't know if they had the technological know-
how and division of labour to do this effectively.  They may also have
decided that the fruit of their time was just not worth the bother of
preserving.  Examination of human faeces shows us that the paleos ate
plants, but we cannot tell if the plants were previously dried or only
fresh.

My guess is that tubers and carrot-type root vegetables that were ready to
eat for a two- or three-month harvest period would have been a more usual
source of plant matter.  I also think some leaves (milk thistles,
dande
lions, herbs and other greens) onions and yams [not sweet potatoes,
but the 3/8 inch tubers on onion-weed and similar] and some grains (but
these would have been little different from what we know nowadays as grass
seeds) might have been the main sources of vegetable fibre.

Would paleos have preferred to spend a day gathering a few handfulls of
husky, fibrous seeds or to eat a roasted or raw pigeon, cat or dog-sized
mammal?

As I cautioned above, this is my own speculation.  I think we have to look
for the core of the paleo diet in foods that were around for most of the
year: meat, shellfish and some insects (like the wichetty grub of
Australia) are the obvious sources.

Any other ideas - or, even better - evidence would be welcome.

Keith