PP >> 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).
>>

W >Possible, though rare due lack of fuel, there are a few bushes, not
>enough for common cooking. 

I meant Paleolithic hunter-gatherers in areas where there were tubers, such
as Africa; not Inuit. Every hunter-gatherer society of today that lives in
an area where there are wild tubers eats them--usually in significant
quantities. That doesn't guarantee that Stone Agers did, but it makes it
plausible. It is a puzzle that needs more researching. I find it hard to
believe that cooked yams could be healthy, but I don't have enough evidence
to refute Wrangham's hypothesis that they were cooked and eaten for as much
as 1.9 million years or more.

W >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.

Interesting, those modern Inuit demonstrated that traditional soapstone
containers can indeed be used to cook and therefore could have been used by
the pre-white Thule and Inuit of the Easter Canadian Arctic. Thanks for
confirming that. 

Here is some more about pre-white soapstone cooking:

"In the Eastern Arctic, the near-exclusive use of soapstone for lamps and
cooking pots dates to the beginning of the Thule period, about l000 years
ago...." (From: The Copper Inuit Soapstone Trade, by DAVID MORRISON, ARCTIC,
pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic44-3-239.pdf)