Since all contemporary human populations appear equally intelligent, I find
it a bit hard to believe that the ability to control fire is not at least
as old as man himself, that is more than 150,000 years. Whether the need to
use it was there is perhaps a more difficult question.

Whatever the use of fire during human evolution, the concept of making
grains or beans edible by way of soaking, souring and fermenting needs
further consideration. Whole meal cereals and other seeds as well as beans
have in their shells phytic acid which strongly binds to minerals like
calcium, iron, zinc and magnesium to form insoluble salts, phytates. There
is overwhelming evidence that whole meal cereals through this mechanism
decrease the absorption of such minerals. In this way cereals are an
important contributing cause of iron deficiency in third world countries
and possibly in the western world.

As to calcium deficiency the picture is less clear. Mellanby found back in
the 30s that dogs got rickets when they were fed oats from early age. The
possible absence of rickets in preagricultural skeletons, its apparent
increase during medieval urbanization and its epidemic explosion during
Western European industrialisation can hardly be explained only in terms of
decreasing exposure to sunlight and decreased length of breast-feeding,
nor to sub-optimal intake of foods rich in vitamin D or calcium. An
possible contributing cause is a secular trend of increasing inhibition of
calcium absorption by phytate from cereals since these apparently increased
in amount during the Middle Ages, and since old methods of reducing the
phytate content such as dampening and heat treatment may have been lost
during the emergence of large-scale cereal processing from the agricultural
revolution. Old fashion sourdough baking decreases the amount of phytic
acid by use of phytases, enzymes which are also found in the cereals but
which often are destroyed during industrial processing.

Non-westernized Melanesians from Kitava, Trobriand islands, that we have
surveyed <http://www.panix.com/~donwiss/paleodiet/sl1.shtml> had four times
higher magnesium levels in hair compared to Swedes, Asian Indians and
westernized Polynesians of Tokelau (the latter three groups had similar
levels) while those of zinc were two-fold higher in Kitavans. Whether the
very low phytate intake in Kitava (they do not eat cereals) is involved
remains speculative.

The claimed notion of members of the raw food community that it might take
a week or two for your digestive tract to adjust to raw cereals finds to my
knowledge no support in the scientific literature, and then I'm exclusively
referring to phytates.

As to other potential dangers of cereals, I have not much to say in this
context, but Loren certainly has, though he may want to wait until after
publication of his extremely interesting paper on cereals to come.

Let me know if you want references.

Staffan