On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Philip Thrift wrote:

> It seems reasonable to me that for paleo man (Neanderthal or not) that
> their *primary motivation* was to seek out *meat* for food, and when
> hunting provided this opportunity, it was exploited --
> after all, they didn't have a bunch of nutrition "studies" telling them
> to eat a "balanced diet" :-).

That's certainly true, but studies of contemporary HGs suggest
that dependence of meat is inversely proportional to availability
of non-meat foods.  That is, the more plant foods are available,
the less meat is eaten.  See
http://biology.uindy.edu/Biol345/LECTURE24/lecture24.htm, for
example.  This suggests that when HGs have a choice, they gather
more than they hunt.

Jared Diamond writes, "It's not until much later, around 100,000
years ago, that we have good evidence about human hunting skills,
and it's clear that humans then were still very *ineffective*
big-game hunters." (Third Chimpanzee, p. 39).  He also writes,
"Sophisticated weapons for safely killing dangerous large animals
at a distance now appear--weapons such as barbed harpoons, darts,
spear throwers, and bows and arrows." (p. 47)  The time referred
to by "now" is about 40,000 years ago, the Late Paleolithic.  His
point is that anatomically modern humans (appearing about 100,000
years ago) were already in existence prior to the major hunting
epoch, suggesting that hunting was not the main force in getting
us to our modern form.

Todd Moody
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