> Cordain:
> "Additionally, wild animals typically have extremely low
> body fat during most of the year and only have significant fat depots
> (still much less than grain reared domestic animals) in the Fall and early
> winter. Hence, year round supplies of high saturated fat food was simply
> unavailable to the majority of the world's hunter-gatherers."

Large domestic animals ( humans,dogs,cows, pigs, camels, sheep, goats, etc.)
are descendant from the only Pleistocene Megafauna to survive, in large
numbers, the Late Pleistocene Extinctions.  This event resulted in over 60%
of the worlds large land animal species to become extinct.  All of these
animals were of much higher fat than the wild game available today and
contained much greater stores of saturated fat than our domestic animals
 being much larger).  They lived with us in areas now considered
near-tropical but which were much cooler during the Ice Ages of the
Pleistocene and dominated by Steppe-tundra grasslands ( pollen samples
indicate that trees became scarce worldwide during most of this period).

That humans are non-tropical hominids ( as evidenced by our susceptibility
to tropical diseases, HIV, Herpes B, Malaria, etc. that are near harmless to
all tropical Primates) is often overlooked by many scientists.  But it has
great implications in studying the environment we evolved in and how its'
end influenced our recent evolution.

When the Earth warmed, beginning in fits and starts in the late Pleistocene,
Man was forced to follow the game North( to the Arctic and then to North
America) and South ( to the Kalhari and Australia).  As we moved further
from the poles, winter lengthened, the ability to harvest fat from animals
in the long winter and gain weight quickly during the shorter summer fruit
season became paramount.  Through the process of Neoteny we lost muscle mass
allowing humans to store fat much more efficiently than Neanderthals could.
Our tolerance of other animals ( another effect of Neoteny) allowed us to
join packs of dogs ( neotinized wolves) in the hunt making light throwing
weapons practical for taking large game for the first time.  Our new hunting
skills allowed to take any animal with ease which many scientists theorize
may have led to a hastening of the extinction event ( especially as the
animals seemed to disappear in time in relation to their fat content ).

Only glycemic load ( the antithesis of fat consumption) has been linked to
heart disease in long term studies.  Some postulate that increased fat
consumption, a result of the invention of the railroad (1840s)and
refrigeration (1900), made possible the incredible increase in lifespan
between 1850 and 1950 - a time in which medical and hygienic advances
contributed little statistically to average lifespan.  Even the daily
serving of fresh fruits and vegetables we take for granted had to wait for
the invention of the automobile and the resulting "truck farms"(1920s).

Ray Audette
Author "NeanderThin"
www.NeanderThin.com