On Wed, 22 May 2002, Philip Thrift wrote:

> >This may be so, but if we take it seriously then we have no
> >reason to exclude cooking-dependent foods at all.  There is,
> >after all, no reason to believe that we cooked meats and nothing
> >else.
>
> We have no reason to believe that only meat was cooked by
> paleopeople. But it does not follow from this that we have no
> reason to exclude any cooking-dependent food. Even if you were
> to accept that plants were cooked (I do), you have to consider
> that the amount plants that were gathered may have been small
> over the meat they had access to and also what types of wild
> plants these actually were (there was no field cultivation)
> that they would have as any significant part of their diet
> (over meat).

But, based on study of contemporary hunter-gatherers, we do have
reason to believe that plants were a substantial part of the
diet.  Even in the rather inhospitable Australian outback, plants
are an important part of the hunter-gatherer diet.  And all
contemporary hunter-gatherers use cooking methods to increase
their yield of plant foods.  And I suspect that with the possible
exception of the traditional Inuit, all contemporary
hunter-gatherers use at least some foods that we would not
consider paleo.

I suspect that the increased yield that I mentioned -- the fact
that cooking makes more foods available -- created a powerful and
virtually overnight advantage for those groups that took
advantage of it, compared to those that didn't.  My guess is that
those groups that didn't catch on to this were quickly put out of
business.

Todd Moody
[log in to unmask]