On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 09:22, Todd Moody wrote:
>   Cooking makes more food available,
> and any hunter-gatherer would recognize that as a good thing.


True, but this doesn't address the picture of a small human population
in an earth swarming with food. We live in an age of scarcity so that
even in rich countries such as Canada some starve, then there are those
who sicken from eating fantasy-foods (fodder) such as wheat - a
different form of starvation.

Rivers used to be full of clams (from a book on the history of the
Mississippi) - difficult for us to imagine, but the idea of food as
scarce seems to dominate modern minds.

If this makes sense, there seems no point in cooking, except in times of
population excess. I've heard nothing of a "boom and bust" population
cycle in paleolithic times; lacking a competent predator on humans this
should have happened.

The population graph I remember shows a practically straight line until
recently (maybe starts to climb ~10,000 years ago), while historians
(after Velikovsky) see a series of catclysmic events; also some
perceptive people (http://www.iceagenow.com/). These two are
incompatible.

William