Staffan Lindeberg wrote:
>Let us start with asking what edible items were found in the African
>savanna, items which all contemporary humans are expected to be adapted to.
>How much vegetable foods were available?

Let me refer you to my WWW page, which has links to an old
syllabus/bibliography (not current, sorry) for a class I teach called
"Prehistoric Diet and Nutrition" and to my home page, which lists a number
of recent articles I have written on this topic.

http://www.indiana.edu/~origins/

Several points:
- a long-term primate perspective on human diet is important for
reconstructing early hominid diets
- the types of foods accessible depend upon the type of technology you have
(e.g. digging tools? fire?) and your guts, which we can only speculate
about for extinct critters, in addition to teeth, etc, which determine the
costs/benefits of foraging decisions... e.g. can you cook your legumes, or
do you eat them at an immature stage before they are hard and tempered with
secondary compounds?
- the range of mixed woodland & grassland environments of our African early
hominid ancestors would have offered plenty of opportunities for plant food
foraging, including many patches of various types of large and small fleshy
fruits (mostly quite fibrous by modern standards) and legumes, and patches
of tender "terrestrial herbaceous vegetation" in riparian forests ; shallow
corms, rhizomes, bulbs and deeply buried tubers in well-drained and/or
rocky soils (most wild tubers I am familiar with are high in dietary fiber,
and simple carbos, but low in starch).  Honey is an often-overlooked
woodland/forest food source.
- archaeological evidence suggests that at least some lean meat and marrow
were a common component of the diets of early Homo, although no one has
been able to estimate relatively how important animal foods were for the
early sites... for a variety of reasons. Animal foods would have been
increasingly important to early hominids invading the temperate zones of
Eurasia during the Pleistocene, and it is clear that folks were actively
hunting by the  Middle Pleistocene.
- if you want to trace nutritional inheritance to the origins of our
species, you can also use a tropical African model... though of course the
% of animal foods will be habitat dependent... which is why the
!Kung-derived 70% veg model is not the best model for interpreting
archaeological evidence for Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers in western
Europe (which is what Eaton and Konner did in their book).

Jeanne Sept

Jeanne Sept
Anthropology Department
Indiana University
Bloomington IN 47405

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http://www.indiana.edu/~origins/