The trouble with your comments is that cooking was only introduced in the last c. 10 percent of the Palaeolithic era(the palaeolithic started 2.5 million years ago) so can hardly be considered typical of Palaeo times as a whole.

As regards the calorie issue, I had already shown, via scientific studies, that cooking, on the whole, actually made meats less digestible  not more. I suppose, though, you are thinking of the minor element of bone-broths.

The notion that we needed to cook meat for survival is kind of dead in the water, from the viewpoint of scientists. For one thing, it's been shown that the Neanderthals moved into their cold climate many hundreds of  thousands of years before they discovered fire, so clearly fire was not needed for hominids to survive in cold climates. Plus, there were several Ice Ages on our planet before the last one which hominids easily survived without ever needing to cook.


Geoff





"I tend to think of raw-only PALEO as an oxymoron. We know that humans or at
least Neanderthals used fire for cooking at least 100,000+ years ago.
We survived as a species by being able to use fire to be able to extract
calories from parts of animals that would normally not be able to be eaten.

Letting meat decay can have a similar effect to cooking.  At some point our
ancestors realized that cooking tough meat was safer in the short term and
more reliable than letting meat rot to extract calories. I have no idea when
that happened.

Here is the rub. It MAY be healthier to eat raw only. (I personally eat my
meat rare, except the tough stuff that I slow cook.) Raw only is a
interesting theory that only time will tell if is correct as a long term
diet. In my opinion, raw only as an evolutionary concept is very
questionable. It is EXTREMELY unlikely we would have survived the ice ages
as a species if we only ate raw. 

I personally think that Garden of Eden eating theories (raw vegetarian or
raw animal foods) where there is some kind of mythical perfect diet under
ideal circumstances are very suspect.

-David"