----- Original Message -----
From: Amadeus Schmidt
> >Didn't hunter gatherers consume HIGH fat diets, for the most part?
>
> Which ones do you mean? Inuit are not our anchestors.
> Africa, where all the autralopethines and most homo habilis/erectus
> remains were found doesn't look like fatty animals have been
> running around there. Even not in autumn/winter (like Ray portrayed),

For most of the last 2,000,000 years that humans (Homo sapiens) have existed
the world was in a series of ice ages.  During this time (the Pleistocene)
several mammal species evolved to take advantage of a particular environment
that no longer exists.  These species, which included Homo sapiens, lived on
the steppe-tundra in densities unknown in any other environment.  These
abundant areas covered large parts of every continent including Africa and
were far more conducive to human habitation than tropical climates.  They
also held much larger human populations than the tropical grassland where
ancestral hominids originally arose.

In many ways this steppe-tundra was more like today's tundra than today's
steppe (even fewer trees due to permafrost).  Indeed, Arctic people
(including the Inuit as well as several Eurasian peoples who are genetically
related) may be considered the last of the Pleistocene hunter-gatherers.
Although not as geographically isolated as their southern brethren in Africa
(of which the !Kung are remnants) or Australia, their culture is far older
and they are much closer relatives of yours genetically than the
genetically older bushmen of Africa.  The people of South Africa really
aren't any older, they've just traveled less!

Those humans that live even today have very little resistance to tropical
diseases that are almost harmless to those species that evolved in their
presence.  It was only at the end of the Pleistocene that humans were forced
into the tropics and thus have had too little time to acquire immunities to
diseases that other Primates of the tropics have little problem with.  We ar
e unlike the Green monkey for whom HIV is a minor problem and more like the
horse (another steppe-tundra remnant) who is susceptible to sleeping
sickness.  African apes who never left the tropics are largely immune to
these disorders.

The forrest of central Europe are very recent. For most of the Pleistocene,
Europe was dominated by steppe-tundra.

Ray Audette
Author "NeanderThin"