>If we outgrew our
>ability to sustain ourselves on game 10,000 years ago, when the world’s
>population was a fraction of what it is now, it makes no sense to me that it
>is ecologically sound now, with 5 billion people populating the planet.

Obviously, too, 5 billion would be too many hunter & gatherers...
instead we have 4.999900000 billion chronically malnourished semi-vegans
living below their genetic capacity in health & lifespan, drunk and sick
on gluten peptides, milk casomorphins, legume toxins, grain molds,
insulin-thrashing hi-carb diets, diabetogenic milk proteins etc etc etc.

The other 100000 or so include *us* and the wild H-Gs out there still being
old-fashioned or getting there as best we can. Paleo is not for everybody,
but the few who can pull it off in this day & age will be better off.

BTW the ability to outstrip our food supply does not change our
genetics, which worked just fine for the hundreds of millennia before
the Neolithic Change.

All other animals share this trait, too, from yeast to wolves & deer.
Ecology 101 presents cyclical consumer-food ups & downs, resembling
two orthogonal sine-cosine waves.  Yeasts die off when they finish
their sugary foodstuff (& drown in their own waste); wolves die off
when they have killed off most of the deer -- whether they recover
& start anew depends on the robustness of the local ecological web.

Since humans are at the top of the food chain, we are our own
predators & prey, hence war and "senseless acts of violence".
But I digress.

>
>...But from an ecological point
>of view, it strikes me as a much more complex topic than either vegetarian
>or paleolithic ideology makes it.

..which is why Ray touches on chaos/complexity theory in _NeanderThin_.
The whole thang is complex beyond one mind's ability to grasp, with
interactions down to the molecular-genetic level too numerous to count.

So why bother trying?  It's kind of a leap, but it should be obvious
that strict vegetarianism is a highly rationalized cultural imperative,
not a rational genetic one.

The flawed substitution of genetically "real" food with inferior
grain/dairy/legume substitutes has only lead to modern sick civilization.