> What is a "paleo"-diet? Or a paleolithic diet?
> A diet that has been eaten in the paleolithicum.
> That's the old stone age.
> That's from the beginning of stone tool making
> (would be some 4.5 mio years
> ago) up to mesolithic ages.
> The reasoning is that we as humans would have
> aquired
> adaptions in our genes to food items and
> compositions.
> This means we have to look far back, because genetic
> changes happen
> very slow. And we have to rule out populations not
> in the
> genetic line of our anchestry.

I'd like to explore this for a moment, if nobody minds
:)

Granted that, in general, genetic changes happen very
slowly, how long does it really take for a *specific*
change to become dominant in the gene pool? For
instance, we can assume that all humans can tolerate
both meat and plant foods in various ratios - some
predisposed to eating meat, others to eating plants.
During an extended ice age period, wouldn't natural
selection simply eliminate most humans who exhibit a
very low tolerance for eating meat - therefore,
increasing the number of "meat eaters" in the general
gene pool? Wouldn't this suggest that we should pay
far more attention to the past 100,000 or so years
rather than to 4 million preceeding that?

I may be way off base, but this line of thought makes
sense to me.....


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