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Date:    Sun, 18 Mar 2001 22:22:12 -0500
From:    Keith thomas <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Honey and (dried) fruit

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:>>

How can you be so sure?

 bee
stings on bare flesh would be a deterrent >>

A deterrent never stopped a stealthy hunter.

and discovering bee hives would
be a rare occurrence. >>

No way.  Paleolithic humans saw everything in their environment.  If the
beehives were there, the people knew about it.

 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. >>

Speculation as to how often they ate honey.

 It would have been nutritionally insignificant.>>

More speculation.

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
have been more fibrous, they would have been more bitter or pungent and
less sweet.  Also, they would have been available only in season.>>

The purpose of dried fruit is to eat it out of season.  It keeps.

  That
means that apples would have been available for about a month and the next
eleven months would have been apple-free.>>

No, the next eleven months would have been dried apple season.

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.>>

You caught me here.  I'll do some research on American Indian drying
techniques.  They dried cranberries, berries, chokecherries, etc.  I see no
reason why Paleolithic peoples would not have known these techniques.

  <snip>
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?>>

I think that the women would have considered it quite worth their while to
gather fruits that could be dried.

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.>>

Food that were around most of the year??  It seems that you and I are
influenced by our environments--yours, Australia, mine, [the relatively
abundant] North America.


Diane
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