> I can't speak for the original poster, but the Inuit, Plains Indians,
> Pygmies, and Yanomamo are all examples of modern man.  When I think of our
> paleo ancestors, I think back before recorded history.  Whatever our
> ancestors did a million years ago has long since faded from the memory of
> even the most primitive modern humans.

That's true, but in a sense the "memory" of those people is preserved by
those few who still practice the hunter-gatherer way of life.  Granted, we
have to use caution when generalizing from the examples of these peoples,
but we can still get insight from them.  After all, the absence of
agriculture is a huge consideration that differentiates them from the rest
of modern humankind, and makes them similar to actual paleo people.

> As to the "fruit in winter" issue, remember that modern humans first
> appeared in Africa, in tropical climates.  Winter wasn't the issue it is
> in temperate climates, and there was fruit (and eggs and insects) all
> year.

No, this isn't right.  The generally accepted view is that during a cycle
of global cooling, the tropical forests shrank, and some apes or apelike
hominids living near the fringe of the forest were forced out into the
grasslands, and had to make a living there.  *They*, not the ones who
stayed in the forests, became our ancestors.  Life in the savanna is very
different from life in the forest, precisely because the availability of
fruit and other edible plant life, is much more limited.  The pressure of
that drastic environmental change is the engine that drove our evolution. 
We had to cease living as apes and take up a different way of living, or
become extinct.  Extinction is the norm in these cases, but we made it
through by becoming a different kind of predator.

No doubt, fruit would occasionally be available in that environment, and
it would only make sense that our ancestors took advantage of it.  Without
refrigeration, the best way to store fruit is to eat it and store it as
fat on your body.  And that's probably what they did.  And where fruit is
scarce and only intermittently available, this would work quite well. 
Incidentally, fruits contain mixtures of various sugars, including
glucose, fructose and sucrose.  In our world, where fruit and its
metabolic cognates (sugary foods and refined carbs) are constantly
available in overwhelming abundance and at low cost, it doesn't work so
well.

Todd Moody