Re comment:- "Many HGs also roasted food directly over flame or slow-
cooked in hot coals > and rocks."   
Hmm, Cordain, in one of his more recent online newsletters, described slow-
cooking as a useful method to reduce the amounts of toxins created by 
cooking( I believe cooking for longer at a lower temperature is better than 
cooking for shorter periods at a higher temperature). But I agree, HGs even in 
palaeo times must have done some roasting as well, 1 reason among many 
others as to why I have serious doubts re the "Noble-Savage" notion that 
they were 100% free of all illness. 

 Re comment:- "You have made this statement before, which is false. 
Generally HGs lived in > an environment with a surplus of food. Sure, at times 
food was scarce, but > that was the exception to the rule."

I made that point re famine as it's commonly accepted by 
palaeoanthropologists that famine was a routine part of the palaeolithic era
(eg:-   "Combined with a relatively low average age at death, the hypoplasia 
evidence suggests that Neandertals underwent periods of nutritional stress or 
famine on a frequent basis "  taken from:-   

http://www.pnas.org/content/98/19/10972.full   

 It doesn't seem remotely plausible to suggest that they had access to plenty 
of foods at all times, given inevitable winter shortages etc., plus there were 
times, such as c.40,000 years ago, when many mammals died out, which 
would have been problematic. Also, one has to wonder:- if palaeo peoples 
really did have access to plentiful supplies of food, why then didn't they 
expand vastly in population during that era if they were less prone to disease 
etc. than in Neolithic times ?    The only plausible explanation for the lack of a 
rise in population is that they practised mass infanticide as a routine method 
to cut off population growth so as  to get round the limited supply of available 
foods. 

Indeed, mass infanticide in the Palaeolithic(and cannibalism) is an established 
fact:-   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide#Paleolithic_and_Neolithic   
Incidentally, I do not claim that famine was a routine, merely that they didn't 
have anywhere near the daily abundant food supply that modern humans 
have, so that they were basically following caloric restriction diets, though not 
starvation diets.

 Geoff