On Fri, 29 Oct 1999, Susan Carmack wrote:

> >I think you have the idea that it is un-paleo for *any* animal to
> >eat grains, or for humans to eat any grain-eating animal.  This
> >is mistaken.
>
> But didn't Paleolithic Period end when the Neolithic Period began with the
> advent of agriculture and the growing of grains?

Sure, and the advent of agriculture marks the beginning of the
domestication of grains, making them a regular rather than
insignificant part of the human diet.  But wild grains were
around long before that (and they're still around), and birds and
other animals would have eaten them, just as they do today.
Wheat and barley and the like are grasses, which is what you find
in grasslands, or savannahs.  Grains were part of the food chain
long before agriculture.

And consider.  If humans themselves never ate wild grains, why
would they go to the trouble of domesticating and cultivating the
things?  Why would they choose an inedible food as a crop?  There
is a paradox here.  We theorize that wild grains were inedible
and too energy-intensive to gather and process to be worthwhile.
So paleo people would have ignored them.  But that makes it very
hard to believe that grains would have chosen for agricultural
purposes.

But I digress...  The point is that birds (for example) eat
grains as well as bugs and worms.  They even eat the grass seed
that you scatter on the bare spots on your lawn.  And people eat
birds, and have done so for a very long time.

Todd Moody
[log in to unmask]