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 [log in to unmask]