On Tue, 22 Aug 2000, Amadeus Schmidt wrote:

> I hope I've made clear, why i consider meat as a paleolithic food (out of
> the arctis and apart from some fatty exemptions)
> as more emergency or not very interesting.

It's clear to the extent that kangaroos are typical of the meat
sources available to paleolithic hunter-gatherers.  I've been
doing some reading about Pleistocene climate variations and, to
say the least, it's a complicated subject.

The Cordain analysis doesn't show that meat was only an emergency
food; it only shows that people couldn't live off the meat of
kangaroo-like animals alone.  So where fattier animals were not
available, other energy sources had to be exploited.  Where these
other sources were plentiful, meat was a less important food,
even though we still know of no societies that dispensed with it
altogether.  In short, there's no evidence that any human
population ever treated meat as strictly an emergency,
"fall-back" food.

Todd Moody
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