Hi Amadeus:



> Unfortunately is the average meat that can be bought in a supermarket
> in western countries *totally* different.
..
> The animals are given food totally different from the insects herbs and roots
> they eat normally.
> This shows up in many health relevant parameters like
> especially the composition of the fats.
> And I think that has to be considered in an attempt to
> describe an anchesters' resembling diet.

I agree with your point here. Which only goes to show that we cannot
just simply adopt a paleo-diet without adopting at least a few other
aspects of the paleo-lifestyle as well, without actually engendering
significant changes in the very way industrial society produces its
food.

Among the Cordillera peoples, whose many rural villages still retain
much of their old hunting-gathering and swidden-farming ways, we don't
get to eat pork, beef, fowl or big game meat everyday, but only
occasionally and in connection with event-driven rituals. We were (and
to a large extent still are) basically riverine peoples, and a large
part of our protein intake are obtained from assorted river life --
fish, mollusks, and aquatic arthropods. And yes, some types of insects
and "worms" (e.g., ants' eggs, pine beetle grub). Animals that would
surely be excluded from any cultural taboo against "killing nice big
animals for food".



> >You're obviously no member of a hunting-gathering community.
> Well I'm better in gathering a little.
> My feelings prevent me from killing nice big animals, so
> hunting is not the right thing for me.

Sorry if I sounded like I was some spear-shaking macho hunter ... I'm
not, and my stomach turns when I see fellow mammals being killed. But
I eat anyway, because the meat IS delicious and my culture values meat
highly.

> Does anyone know about fossil traps (holes...) that were found?
> Any records if early hominids (habilis, erectus) did build them?
> I know of big neolithic trap buildings for mass-killing of antelopes
> in the near east.

There's a classic archeological study of a pre-agricultural American
hunting people that apparently used the modus operandi of driving
bison herds into cliffs, and then butchering all they could get from
the messy carnage. Not very clean kills, I could imagine...

BTW, perhaps it would help the discussion if we consider with care the
distinctions between cultural epochs (Paleolithic, Mesolithic,
Neolithic) on one hand, and physiological evolutionary stages on the
other hand (australopithecines, habilis, erectus, and so on). They do
not correspond very well, especially in America and Asia. Sapiens
sapiens is not necessarily Neolithic. Mesolithic HG technologies and
diets are very different from Paleolithic HG tools and diets, at least
based on archeological evidence.


     Jun V.