On Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:06:54 -0500, Geoffrey Purcell
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>... In truth, 
>however, many such tribes were hardly free of disease, and most died long 
>before the age at which modern peoples start getting degenerative illnesses, 

Audette effectively rebutted this argument in his book and Cordain rebutted
it on his Website (http://thepaleodiet.com/faqs). It's an old topic that has
been covered so extensively here and elsewhere that I would probably be
wasting people's time by rehashing it.

>as "life was "brutish, nasty and short".

That derives from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, in which he advocated for a
centralized government with god-like power. Ironically, Hobbes was
specifically talking about agrarianists during the English Civil War. 

Hobbes' description of the lives of the Englishmen of his time is fairly
accurate, but his speculation as to the source of their misery went too far:
 "Nature," Hobbes argued, makes men "apt to invade and destroy one another"
(and by extension was to blame for the English Civil War). The idea that
Nature (or Nature's Creator) is the main source of humanity's problems, and
that man can do better, seems rather presumptuous to me; and to extrapolate
that because Englishmen are miserable, Stone Agers must have been even more
miserable, seems rather unscientific. Yes, Chimpanzees and hunter-gatherers
war upon each other, but their wars pale in comparison to agrarian wars.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to delve much further into this at the
moment, so I'll refer you again to Audette and Cordain, as well as Boyd
Eaton, Jared Diamond, Daniel Quinn and others who have also rebutted fairly
effectively the arguments that derive from the Hobbes snippet. 

Here's a good quote about it from this forum:

"Life became nasty when we *left* the state of nature." --Jim Swayze

>1) It is, indeed, entirely irrelevant as to whether human hunter-gatherer
tribes 
>have ever been on a 100% raw diet

Looks like we'll have to agree to disagree on that one. 

>(though I've heard someone making recent 
>claims re the Tasmanian Aborigines in that regard). 

It's interesting that the Tasmanians reportedly cooked prior to contact with
moderners, even though they allegedly didn't know how to make fire at the
time. If the reports about that are true, it would suggest that proto-humans
may have started cooking before they learned to control fire.

>...The Masai, for example a typical hunter-gatherer tribe, 
>eat lots of raw dairy for example, 

The Masai are pastoralists rather than hunter-gatherers (hence, the dairy as
a staple food).

>while the pre-contact Maoris would go in for 
>grains like manioc etc., none of which were found in palaeo times. 

Manioc (aka yucca root, aka casava) is a starchy tuber, more similar to yams
than grains. 

>Again, this is based on a false premise. First of all, like most
raw-foodists, I do 
>not actually claim that "cooked-food kills!"(LOL)...

We agree on that, and, like I wrote earlier, I'm not saying that people
should eat only cooked food or avoid raw food. The view I expressed was that
I'm not convinced that it's necessary to eat 100% raw to be healthy. Maybe
you agree with me on that?

>Secondly, as soon as humans invented fire, natural selection was no longer a 
>driving force(or even relevant) for humans once fire was used, initially, to 
>scare away natural predators(wildlife fear fire, after all) which would
otherwise 
>have preyed on them. 

I was thinking more in terms of attractiveness to mates and number of
offspring than surviving predators. 

>Re advent of cooking:- Unfortunately, Wrangham's ideas re early cooking have 
>long been discredited. If you google archaeological info/articles, you'll
find that 
>most anthropologists do not even seriously consider Wrangham's notions(eg:-

I don't want to get too drawn in to defending Wrangham, as I seriously doubt
that his hypothesis about yam-eating being a major evolutionary trigger is
correct. I just included his figure in a range to show that the claim that
cooking has not been around for long is outside the pale. His estimate is at
the extreme high-end of the 250,000 - 2 million year range, so it is of
course controversial (thanks for the article links, though, as there were
some I hadn't seen yet that I can use when debating vegetarians/vegans :-) ). 

Since 250,000 years extends back before the accepted time of the evolution
of homo sapiens sapiens around 125,000 - 200,000 years ago, it would seem to
be sufficient time for adapting significantly (though probably not fully) to
eating cooked meats--though as the estimates for both cooking and the
evolution of h. sapiens sapiens get pushed back, the evidence can shift one
way or the other. Eating cooked meats would seem to be a less drastic change
than eating large quantities of ground grains and grain products.