On Mon, 26 Nov 2001 16:35:10 -0800, Peter Brandt <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>Amadeus:
> >100% d'accord with what naturalhub said.
> >One first lesson to hear from this is variation over the year.
>
>Yet, the diet that you are proposing is quite far off from such a diet.

How do you know?
I use a lot of variation, I don't have a year round staple.

>I am not sure what a "fallback" food is but as far as I know they do
>not dispute that animal foods played a pivital role in the evolving
>hominid diet.

Fallback means that the normal primate food - which are fruit seeds
blossoms insects which are abundant in a rain forest stops beeing available
some time in the year. If the rainforest develops toward the savannah or
open woodland like it has been in wide areas of east africa with the onset
of the ice age.
Chimps also have a fallback food, when fruit are rare, its bark and stems
etc everytime available in the wood. Gombe Chimps eat colobus monkey babies
then.

In a savannah chimps and gorillas can't survive - in the dry season.
Early antecessors had the options to adapt to savannah or move out our die
out if they lived in a rain forest island before.
The main adaption to the savannah is to find another fallback-food,
and in the savannah USOs (tubers) are abundant.
That's since australopithecines. Bipedal and still with climbing adaption.

My personal idea is that bipedalism and some other human adaptions (like
sweating, loosing the fur, tears) enable the  uprising hominids
to forage in the daytime. When the lions sleep.

In this predator free zone hominidscould forage a big area, for
tubers or leftovers.

While at night they could escape onto the trees.

The next step would be fire, to scare off the predators and cook some items.
That's seen in homo erectus, which lost the climbing adaption and had a big
body enlargement, particularly of the females.
Gut reduction, teeth reduction.

>
> >I follow the tuber path, it seems more probable to me.
>
>Well, lucky you that coincides with you happening to be a vegetarian. ;-)

That's part of the sympathy for me, but looking scientifically we shouldn't
look onto our motives but on the facts.
And very important not forget the facts because of one's motives.

Amadeus