On Tue, 22 Aug 2000 09:17:15 -0400, Cheyenne Loon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Amadeus, I was just talking to a Chippewa geologist, who mentioned that
>West
>Coast Canadian Natives (Haida?? I'll have to check) used to mine native
>copper found in the area, which they then beat into useful implements....
>They also traded their copper to other tribes.  So there was limited use of
>metal pots in some hg cultures.

Thanks for your interesting details on native american culture.

I suspect, that the American copper use is even very much younger than
it's use in the old world. It's not paleolithic.
(this is what the artefacts tell us).

It is not, that native american are automatically h/g cultures.
To my information most of them were hunting, but excellent farmers.
Iroquese (east coast) are best on my memory for their "wonderfull" gardens
of fruit trees, sunflower, pumpkin and more.
It's just that their only cereal was maize and that they had a too limited
resource of animals for husbandry.
Maize is unsuitable as a sole staple, because it's deficient in vitamin b3.
Goats, sheep and cattle, beside their usefullness in producing clothes,
give milk which is way more productive than meat production by house
animals.
Horses provided a tremendous military advantage for the european invaders.
Horses (which all stem from spaniard origin since max. 500 years) are also
the means, which enabled hunter cultures to further exploit the gigantic
bison herds.
It may gave lasted for some hundred years, but I estimate that this way of
living was not long term sustainable. It just may have lasted a few hundred
years more until the bison herds begun to shrink.

As you tell, before the european invasion, the american continents were
already in a a kind of copper age or even bronze age (mexico).
In the old world this happened about 4-5000 years ago. 5000 years after the
agriculture was introduced.

> [In case there weren't enough skulls to go
>around ;-) ].

As i already suspected, some sort of nature vessels may be available in
paleo-times. They may be useful to catch some fat running down if game
was roasted over an open fire. However i doubt, that it would be possible
to permanentely install a skull between a fire and a game.
I think this, together with the limited fat of game makes "roasting over
a fire" highly unlikely as a paleo cooking method.

There are few fatty games (you mentioned goose, beaver, duck) which are
somewhat richer in fat.
But out of the arctis this are few (exactely only the ones, which need to
have insulation from water temperature, or which are hibernating).

Have you seen that Loren Cordain in his last posting has corrected his
fat computation of the kangaroo to a much smaller amount of fat?

"With 3.6 % body fat, our 3rd order
 polynomial equations (2)show that an animal with 3.6% body fat by weight
 would have 27% fat by energy and 73 % protein by energy."
at http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/CGI/wa.exe?A2=ind0008&L=paleodiet&P=416

It's nice, which a whole body summation. At last we have some figures
to which the fat in the various body parts (like marrow) amounts.

Here we are again at the average of < 4% fat, as before.

cheers

Amadeus S