>Paleolithic diets are expected to be beneficial for calcium balance for
>three reasons:
>
>1       Calcium INTAKE from vegetables is high. This is because vegetables
>are rich in calcium when this is measured in mg per unit of energy,
>actually close to dairy products, and because much of the western foods are
>low in calcium (e.g. margarine, oil, sugar and cereals).

 I forgot to add in my previous post that foraged wild green leafies are
*much* higher in calcium and other essential minterals than cultivated
ones. Here in central NH, I'm able to forage every day for about seven
months of the year.

 Right now, for instance,  I'm harvesting lamb's quarters, chickweed,
milkweed shoots and amaranth (pigweed). I add the smaller leaves to salads,
or cook them along with the cultivated ones from my garden. The dandlelions
and stinging nettles have passed their tasty stage now, but I consumed them
in huge quantities from mid-april until mid-May. Yum! Also, many leaves
used for tea-making: wild raspberry, strawberry, etc. are good sources of
calcium and other minerals.

There are many good books available on wild food harvesting; Euell Gibbons'
Stalking the Wild Asparagus and his other works are classics; public
libraries will have many titles on the subject. The coop. extension service
in your area may even offer free tip sheets or workshops on harvesting from
the wild; check the bulletin boards at health food stores - some areas
offer wild foraging tours. If you do go out on your own, don;t havest
anything within about 50 feet of a highway, and don't harvest  around the
edges of commercially cultiavted fields (wild perennial weeds concentrate
toxic amounts of nitrates from the commercial fertilizers) and don't pick
stuff from beneath power lines (pesticide lane!).

One final note: Bake your picked-over chicken or turkey carcasses in a slow
oven with a couple of quarts of water (herbs and veggies to flavor if you
wish) for a  long, long time, until the bones are very brown and crispy;
much of the calcium will have leached out.  Use this extremely flavorful
broth for cooking (do NeanderThins cook? I'm in the Zone) or just plain
drinking.

In all seriousness, it's probably not a good idea to gnaw a lot of bones
from animals you didn't raise or whose origins you can't trace. Like
livers, bones can concentrate toxic substances from the environment in
which the animal grew.