On Wed, 7 Feb 2001, Amadeus Schmidt wrote:

> I welcome every book which finds different and better paleo-ways as just
> demonizing "grains" and replacing them by mass agriculture food.

I agree with you on this.  One of the things that bothers me
about Neanderthin, for example, is statements like "My definition
of nature is *the absence of technology*."  Technology, however,
comprises any tools at all, including rocks and sharp sticks.
Hominids have been using technology from at least as far back as
homo erectus, and this technology has been for processing food.
In fact, I would claim that human survival has depended on
technology for as long as there have been humans (i.e., anything
after australopithecus).  And technology is a continuum, not
something that appeared abruptly.

Using stones to crack bones (or nut shells) to get marrow is a
technology-dependent practice.  Technology was definitely needed
to obtain and process animal skins for clothing, without which
humans would not have survived in the cold climates.  In fact,
the trend of recent discoveries has been to show that paleo
technology was more sophisticated that we thought (For example,
the discovery that seaworthy boats were built 700,000 years ago).
There's a great debate about how old cooking is.  In Neanderthin
we are told it was the "end of the Paleolithic era" but in fact
there is evidence that it was much earlier.  (see
http://www.discoveringarchaeology.com/0599toc/5feature3-fire.shtml,
for example).

In any case, it is also an illusion to suppose that cooking
provides a sharp boundary between what is edible and what is
inedible.  Plant foods have various concentrations of
antinutrients, toxins, and lectins, including the ones that we
eat raw.  The ones that we can't eat raw have higher
concentrations of essentially these same substances (which  Ann
Brower Stahl calls "secondary compounds").  Technologies such as
soaking and cooking reduce the levels of secondary compounds in
some of these "inedible" foods to levels comparable to the
"edible" ones.  The notion that when we eat foods that have to be
cooked we are consuming substances that were not present in our
previous foods is not really true.

Personally, I am certain that humans have been eating some grains
(oats, millet) and some legumes (lentils, probably) for a very
long time, "processing" them by the low-tech methods of soaking
(and rinsing) and parching.  I don't claim that these were
staples or that it is good for them to dominate the diet.  Even
in Neanderthin we read (p. 57) "Almost no evidence exists that
eating cooked beans will harm humans (except perhaps socially
because of flatulence).  That cooking is required to eat beans is
enough, however, to exclude them from a Paleolithic diet."  Even
Ann Brower Stahl notes that *some* legumes are eaten raw by other
primates, so the latter claim is false.  And since the technology
needed to make legumes edible was easily within reach of
Paleolithic humans, there is really no good reason to exclude
them altogether.

Jean Auel's books may be very speculative in terms of what
Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons were actually eating, but they are
indeed an eye-opener for insight into what they *could* have been
eating.

Todd Moody
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