>>Quite to the contrary, I find it difficult to imagine how these people could
>>have avoided being familiar with and making the most of fermentation. The
>>simplest example of grapes that were picked and not immediately consumed but
>>placed in a container such as a gourd or skin of some sort, comes to mind.
>>The fermentation starts immediately and is ongoing. The 'blush' of the grape
>>is the source of the micro-organisms that do the work of fermenting the grape

>I think this applies to milk/yogurt/cheese also.

I tend to agree with this, up to a point.  Wine and curds make themselves
as soon as the raw materials are stored for more than a few hours.   We
also had a discussion some months ago about how ancient cooking is, in
its simpler forms.  However, these are definitely non-standard opinions,
in relation to this list.   I personally assume that simple meat cooking
techniques like steaming, roasting, and smoking, were definitely around,
and to some extent foods like grape wine, olives and goat cheese were
also around,  anciently (say in the range of 10,000  or more years ago)
in the areas where my forbearers lived.   However, I don't expect this to
become a standard perspective on this list.

I think the "orthodox" opinion on this list is that if you couldn't get
it based on an absolutely  opportunistic approach to feeding yourself, it
doesn't qualify as "paleo".   Personally, I believe that there was a good
deal of craft and technology devoted to cooking and preserving long, long
before the widespread adoption of organized agriculture.  In my mind,
this would be so if only to make the food more easily portable, if not
also to extend the benefit of seasonal abundance.

I do imagine cooking arising very soon after the taming of fire as a
by-product of an obvious strategy to protect food from scavengers.  What
better way to keep the starving hyenas and the flies off your meat than
to surround it with a ring of fire?   Somebody want to remind me how long
humans, or pre-humans are thought to have had fire?

While I am ready personally to believe that wine and cheese were in the
diet in a minor way for a long time before the dominance of organized
agriculture,  I do doubt that foods like wine and cheese made up any
_large_ portion of the diet for most individuals, anciently.  And, what
was definitely _not_ around were all the additives you normally find in
these kinds of foods as we get them commercially today.

To go off on a vaguely related tangent,  I just read somewhere that those
in a position to pronounce on such matters have now acknowledged that
chimps have "culture" in the academic meaning of the term.  This is in
the form of domestic habits, including ways of getting food and  eating,
that are not biologically determined  but which are created and learned,
and which are also observed to be passed from one generation or group to
another.