Although there is plenty to disagree with, the book reviewed below 
would still be worth getting.

Keith
-------------------------------------------------
Meat, bones and marsh plants: the healthy prehistoric diet



ELEANOR COWIE
July 10 2006



Take a trip, if you will, down memory lane. As you go, try to recall 
the foods, the meals, the various animal remains that were cheerfully 
pushed down your throat by parents and loved ones in the name of good 
nutrition. Now consider these dishes: fish soup made from an entire 
fish, including the head and tail; grilled ox tails; slott (made from 
cod roe and flour); boiled samphire (a marsh plant); laverbread (bread 
made from seaweed); and boiled marrow bones. Feel any differently about 
your earliest food experiences?
As frightening and unappealing as these dishes may sound, for our early 
ancestors they constituted everyday meals.
According to Prehistoric Cookery, a new book published by English 
Heritage, such meals were eaten with gusto by early man. In her book, 
author Jane Renfrew argues that these recipes are not only more 
palatable than we might assume, but that they provide historians with a 
valuable insight into what nutrition was like hundreds of years ago. 
Through explaining the origins of our diet, its sources and how and 
what went into everyday meals, Renfrew seeks to disprove the widely 
held belief that our forebears' diet was unremittingly dull, tedious 
and tasteless.
It is worth noting that not all recipes and foodstuffs in the book date 
from pre-history. In fact, most would have been devised by those living 
in Bronze Age Britain, after the introduction of agriculture. Renfrew 
acknowledges this and points to the difficulty in obtaining ingredients 
used in the palaeolithic period (800,000 to 10,000BC), such as rhino 
joints or mammoth steaks. There is also a dearth of archaeological 
evidence.
Moreover, prehistoric humans are understood to have been 
hunter-gatherers; in other words they ate what they found or hunted, 
with little deviation or culinary fuss.
So what, if anything, can we extract from examining early man's diet? 
Is it anything more than just interesting reading for the historically 
minded? The hunter-gatherers' diet is sometimes held up as a lost idea; 
one theory even has it that people of certain blood types suffer by not 
following such a diet. Is there anything our ancestors' diet can teach 
us?
Renfrew believes so. For a start, the diet clearly demonstrates the 
development of humans' relationships with food, tastes and cooking. It 
also teaches us that early humans in the remotest parts of Scotland and 
England wasted nothing. Regardless of the animal on the chopping block, 
everything was used – udders, tripe, brains, head, feet, tails, blood 
and even gristle were made into dishes in the absence of any 
alternatives.
Replicating such an approach to cooking may be unnecessary today 
because of the wealth of alternatives, but it stands as a reminder that 
however repulsive eating a dog, rat or hamster appears to us in western 
Europe, since the earliest recordings of our dietary habits, people 
have eaten all manner of things to survive and satisfy their appetite.
The simplicity of meals is another characteristic Renfrew draws to the 
reader's attention. Rather than cooking with elaborate sauces, spices 
or liquids, meat and fish was roasted with little interference on an 
open fire or spit. As dissatisfaction with fussy, highly processed and 
often unhealthy western meals grows, many, including Renfrew, hark back 
wistfully to this natural, rustic style of cooking.
However, Brian Ratcliffe, professor of nutrition at Robert Gordon 
University in Aberdeen, believes we ought to be wary of 
over-romanticising our ancestors' diet. He maintains that 
hunter-gatherers – for instance palaeolithic man – had a 
nutrient-deficient diet compared to 21st-century man. The clearest 
evidence of this, he says, is that humans did not live for very long.
"It is important to realise that whatever you are discussing about 
prehistoric nutrition and diet is speculative because of a shortage of 
written evidence," he says. "The most of what we can speculate about 
early man is that his diet would have been very restrictive. We are not 
talking about settled people; these early peoples would have lived 
nomadic lives. They would have had to follow the animals that they 
hunted for food. They were also restricted to the seasons; [people 
living in Britain] would have moved north in the summer to find food, 
fruits and berries, while in the winter they would have moved south.
"Most of what we know was that they had to live hand to mouth. At that 
time they did not grow old – people were only living for a few decades, 
long enough to reproduce the next generation. I think there's a lot of 
nonsense about modern man's diet being so bad and looking to early man 
for lessons. Early man's diet, particularly later when pastoralisation 
began, was full of nutritional deprivation, full of nutritional 
inadequacies. In order to eat, they had to follow the food supply and 
that was very changeable."
With the introduction of agriculture from 800BC onwards, people moved 
from being hunter-gatherers to farmers, taking on husbandry of animals 
so they could control the supply of food. Professor Ratcliffe, who also 
works for the Nutrition Society, says that while the food supply was 
more controlled than before, it was far from ideal. "As humans move 
into the agricultural period, they moved to using a staple food," he 
explains. "This staple was a crop-based food which provided most of the 
energy and protein needs. But what we see here is that there was a 
trade-off taking place. Growing crops provided some constancy in food 
supply, but the problem was that people had to stay in one area and so 
they were derived of the benefits of gleaning foods, like fruits and so 
on, from other areas as their hunter-gatherer ancestors would have 
done. The upshot of this was that they became very reliant on these 
staple foods.
"The other problem with this reliance on one staple is it tended to be 
focused on one or two grains. They did not have the multiplicity of 
crops that we have now, and their yields would have been much lower. 
People would have had to expend a lot of energy for relatively 
low-yielding crops."
Professor Ratcliffe maintains the most important lesson to be learned 
from our ancestors is that a restricted diet is not desirable. "The 
main lesson is that as humans we need a huge variety of food from a 
range of different sources and food groups," he says. "We can see from 
early man's experience that it is not good enough to rely upon single 
sources and single groups of foods because they did not give them the 
nutrients they needed. [In the Iron Age] the diet was largely meat and 
cereal-based and would have been nutritionally deficient in vitamin C, 
and they would certainly have had problems with calcium and vitamin D. 
There would still have been deprivations, crops failures and famines 
resulting from those failures, and disease within animals. In other 
words, [farming man] had an existence that was full of supply problems, 
like his predecessors."
Dr Kerri McPherson, lecturer in evolutionary psychology at Queen 
Margaret University in Edinburgh, argues that from an evolutionary 
perspective eating behaviours in mankind have not changed that 
significantly. "Humans have developed different foods to eat," she 
says. "We have moved away from natural food to a more processed diet, a 
process which started with the introduction of agriculture about 
100,000 years ago. But we have not physiologically evolved to cope with 
the change. Basically our environmental evolution has moved too quickly 
for the human species. The psychological mechanisms involved with food 
and eating behaviours have not caught up with the change in foods that 
we eat. We have been designed to cope with feast or famine, but the 
problem is that we don't live in those times any more. The psychology 
that drives us to eat is still preparing us for the famine, encouraging 
us to overeat."
Professor Ratcliffe adds: "For our generation the threats to life and 
quality of life depend on eating too much salt or fat. Early [Iron Age] 
man was not concerned about such matters because he did not live long 
enough to be so. When man started using salt to preserve food, he was 
not worrying about the effects of eating too much of it. Today our 
concerns are very different; we are focused on eradicating diseases 
like cancer and how different food could help that as well as reducing 
a person's risk of getting it."
 
Prehistoric Cookery, Recipes and History, by Jane Renfrew, English 
Heritage, £7.99
From: http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/65545-print.shtml