Paleo Phil wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Jan 2009 19:21:19 -0500, william <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>   
>> Post-contact Inuit cooked, IIRC according to Stefansson because they
>> thought that white men could not live on raw. Some here apparently
>> believe the same. Pre-contact, they had neither pots not reason to use them.
>>     
>
> According to sources like "Ancient Pottery of the Pacific Rim"
> (http://www.workingdogweb.com/Pottery.htm), Canadian Arctic pottery predates
> both the whites and the Inuit (and even pre-dates the pre-Inuit Thule
> culture). It says that ceramic clay pottery dates back 3,500 years in the
> Arctic. Soapstone pottery also predates the later metal pots of the whites.
> Inuit culture apparently developed out of the earlier Thule culture around
> 500 years ago. 
>   

There was a pole shift some thousands of years BC, confirmed both by 
geological record and the remains of real trees in northern Archtic 
archipelago. Before the shift, the North Pole was somewhere between the 
southern tip of James Bay and the present U.S. border.
Ocean currents could then have warmed the islands enough for the kind of 
people who made pottery.
This is not relevant to Stefansson's time.

>
>   
>
> West coast Eskimos apparently didn't have much problem with smoke from
> cooking during the winter, and they even had two "cook rooms"!:
>
> <<A winter house in northwest coastal Alaska was called an "inne". Built
> underground during the summer months, the inne was a permanent dwelling.
West Coast or Pacific Inuit lived in a place so warm that they could dig 
in the earth and trees or bushes could grow.
Stefansson's area, roughly the MacKenzie Delta, has about <2" of topsoil 
in my experience, and the rest is permanently frozen solid. Apply any 
heat, (even weak sunlight) and a hole turns into a pond, as the 
permafrost is either ice or mud. A geologist in the area told me that if 
the climate ever warmed the coast would be about 200 miles further south.





> As for Eastern Inuit, multiple (though not all) sites claim that they used
> the qulliq for heat and cooking as well as light:
>
>   

Their lifestyle so differs from moderns that the imagination of 
historians/archaeologists fails, then they impose modern lifestyles on a 
people who lived in an alien environment.
Note the cartouche (name of Khufu) found in the great pyramid of Gizeh, 
when the paint was analyzed, it was found to have been made in 
Birmingham, England in 1840.
Some historians can lie, others can be fools.
> I agree that eating only cooked food contributes to illness. I'm not arguing
> that we should eat only cooked food, just that avoiding all cooked food is
> unnecessary, as I believe even you admit that the Inuit and Nenets cooked
> some of their food during the summer, and that it's at least theoretically
> possible that tubers could have been cooked and eaten for at least the past
> 250,000 years (though how much was consumed, I don't know).
>
>
>   
Possible, though rare due lack of fuel, there are a few bushes, not 
enough for common cooking. In the movie "The Fast Runner" cooking 
ptarmigan eggs in a small  soapstone container was shown.
But those actors were modern Inuit, by their teeth and clumsy gait on 
snow at least as degenerate as the rest of us.

Tubers do not grow in permanently frozen earth, and even if they traded 
with southern folk (Indians) which is not possible because they always 
killed each other on sight, the resultant blood sugar spike after eating 
would have done bad things to them.

William