Sheryl Could you supply your references for use of fire by the genus homo? The beyondveg web site goes into a in depth discussion of this and can find no evidence to indicate that fire was used conistently before 125,000 years ago. Also, do you characterize homo habilis as physiologically modern humans? I don't and neither do the paleo anthropologists I've read. A whole lot of genetic change occurred between 2 mya and when homo sapiens sapiens first appeared 100,000 years ago. Mark > For starters... all these numbers are estimates based on archeological > findings, and science evolves over time. So far the current best estimate of > when a physiologically modern human first walked the earth is about 2 million > years ago. The earliest evidence of use of fire by humans is (at this time) > about 1.5 million years ago. That doesn't mean that they didn't use it > earlier. It means that they were using it AT LEAST 1.5 million years ago. > > Second... Think about what the theory of paleolithic nutrition says... The > idea is not to eat what we ate BEFORE we evolved into physiologically modern > humans. If you look at it that way, then maybe we should try to match the > diet of amoebas. The theory behind paleolithic nutrition is that the foods > that are eaten most frequently by humans on earth today (grains and milk > products) were only introduced into our diets with the advent of agriculture, > about 10,000 years ago. From an evolutionary standpoint, 10,000 years is not > very long. Our bodies are not fully adapted to eating this way, and many > health problems--some subtle, some not so subtle--are the result. We are > better adapted to the diet eaten by our species for the last million years > than the last 10,000 years. > > Even assuming that the first physiologically modern humans didn't use fire > for 500,000 years (and that's an assumption--the timing estimates are so > close that they are well within a margin of error for being the same), it > still makes no sense to say that we are healthiest eating what we ate for a > 500,000 year span rather than what we ate for the 1.5 million years following > that period. If humans have used fire for 1.5 million years, then we are > very well adapted to cooked food. > > > As for modern "paleo" people eating food raw, that's an entirely > different discussion which has no place in the basic discussion of which > foods could have been eaten by pre-tech humans. > > I disagree. It's extremely relevant. Eating raw meat--perhaps still warm > from a kill--is not very appealing anyone I know, and I don't think it's just > cultural habit. Cooked meat tastes better to most of us (I assume there are > exceptions, though I haven't met these people). I'd hypothesize that this is > body wisdom, and arises from our 1.5 million year history of eating cooked > food. I'd guess that our bodies are better adapted to eat certain foods > cooked--for example, red meat. > > - Sheryl