On Fri, 7 Jan 2005 21:06, Jean-Claude Catry wrote:

>>I think it's important to note,
>> therefore, that humans have *always* cooked, for as long as there have
>> been humans.  Remember that the paleolithic era ends only about 12,000
>> or so years ago,

Although this was the end of the 'paleolithic era', that is merely a convenient and arbitrary 21st
century way of simplifying what was actually a messy process.  The people at that time would not
have noticed that they were in a process of transition.  If we are contrasting paleolithic behaviour
with neolithic behaviour, it is still messy.  Likely the first domestication was of wild animals
(keeping them in a confined gorge, for example) or fish (in 'traps' - fenced off parts of streams)
rather than wild grains, tubers etc.  Even then, although some hunter-gatherers began
rudimentary farming, this seems to have occurred in isolated pockets in a number of widely
dispersed locations: the west of the Fertile Crescent, the Yangtse valley, the highlands of New
Guinea, Meso-America, and tiny parts of present-day India, Egypt and Korea.  All these locations
are known for their domestication of plants rather than of animals.  These are places where
farming began.  However, there were plenty of places (including the entire Australian continent)
which was predominantly paleolithic up to 150-200 years ago.

Keith