Andrew Millard's interesting post of 11 Nov concluded:

>Accepting the genetic evidence for a bottleneck mentioned above leads
>to acceptance of an Out Of Africa II scenario rather than a Multiregional
>Evolution scenario for the origin of modern humans, and thus to place
>the dispersal event of interest at c.120-100ka.  Therefore it is amongst
>archaic Homo sapiens and possibly late Homo erectus *in Africa* that we
>should seek this diet, and probably in some smaller
>(but as yet undefined) part of Africa.

His post reinforced some
thoughts I have had, namely that the focus that some
seem to have on the diet of Upper Paleolithic temperate zone
peoples as a guide for our "evolutionary diet" may be misplaced.
Andrew's idea also would cast some doubt on the approach taken
by Eaton et al to approximate our "evolutionary diet"
(i.e., averaging across modern-day HGers).
If we accept the Out of Africa scenario, then we might do better
by looking at the diets of modern HGers living in environments
that approximate the conditions under which our African
forebears evolved. But maybe the problem with such an approach
is the fact that modern HGers have been pushed to more marginal
environments (forest, arid zones, etc.) than the ones in which
their ancestors lived in.

I have a question for Andrew:
Why do you only go as far back as late Homo erectus?


Steve Meyers
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley, CA 94720 USA
E-mail: [log in to unmask]