Re "nasty, brutish and short":- The trouble is that Audette. Cordain et all, are 
naturally biased given their espousal of a cooked, Palaeolithic diet. Plus, 
evidence from genuine anthropologists, uninterested in the whole issue of diet, 
shows that pre-contact peoples, such as the Eskimoes, did indeed incur many 
diseases, which they most certainly did not all get from contact With European 
colonists etc.:-

http://tinyurl.com/9ksxrk

http://tinyurl.com/a5mz6j


An anthropologist recently pointed out a glaring flaw in the whole notion of 
Palaeolithic peoples being free of disease. She pointed out the majority of the 
evidence indicates that, in the past, disease was rampant among any society 
that domesticated animals in any way, whether of urban or pastoral origin. So, 
those tribes which didn't rely on domesticated animals, in a big way, for food, 
were less affected by disease. Another factor, which is often used as a 
rebuttal to such notions of paradise in palaeo times is the point made by some 
anthropologists that Palaeo tribes lived in relative isolation from each other, 
thus reducing greatly chances of infection and the kind of plagues that would 
run through heavily over-populated urban areas in the Neolithic.

Re Tasmanians/cooking:- The idea that cooking could have preceded 
knowledge of how to control fire is infinitesimally unlikely. That would mean 
relying on occasional,natural sources of fires of natural origin(ie bush-fires 
started by lightning), putting sticks into the fire so as to burn, and then 
keeping a fire going for ages. Since, keeping a fire going for long periods 
requires a certain degree of knowledge re control of fire(I know this from my 
camp-fire days), it would mean that the Tasmanians etc. would have had to 
eat mostly raw,99% of the time.

In short, it is much more likely that the invention of fire preceded the invention 
of fire for cooking, by a long way. Especially since, humans did not have a 
point of comparison, as no other wildlife species ever cooked its food.

Re Masai:- Well, that's merely a question of terms and definitions. The Masai 
are generally referred to as hunter-gatherers by most people(judging from 
websites, anthropologists etc.) What is clear, however, is that many hunter-
gatherer tribes in the Neolithic ate grains and other non-Palaeo items, such as 
the Dinkas of Sudan(here's an article claiming that such grin-eating is 
healthy!):-

http://www.herbshealing.com/herbal_ezine/September05/empower.htm

http://tinyurl.com/7pby3p

Quite aside from the questionable notion of tubers being a Palaeolithic staple 
food, one has to bear in mind that they are also a very poor-quality food, 
often full of toxins as well. For example, cassava, eaten by large numbers of 
Africans, contains cyanide compounds, so has to be speciallyprepared before it 
can even be eaten. So, there is also the issue of antinutrients in tubers, which 
makes me doubt that it can be considered a healthy food. Maybe tubers were 
turned to, in desperation, in times of famine when meat was  not as available
(such as in the last few thousands of years at the end of the Palaeolithic), but 
that doesn't make it a healthy food. So when Weston-Price and Palaeos 
enthuse about the supposed health of hunter-gatherer tribes in general when 
many recent tribes ate very unhealthy foods, I tend to be very sceptical, 
indeed.


Re "cooked-food kills"/"not necessary to eat 100% raw to be healthy:-  Not 
really. I would say that the less cooked-food one eats, the healthier one will be
(certainly, judging from my own experience) - there are grades of health, after 
all. One of the interesting pieces of data I came up with was that 2 of the 
types of toxins created by heating/cooking food, namely nitrosamines(NSAs) 
and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons(PAHs), were also found in cigarette-
smoke,

http://tinyurl.com/793b82


 so I'm simply not convinced that it is possible to be 100% (super-)healthy 
when including some cooked-food(though perhaps eating only very little 
cooked-food would allow the body to stave off any truly serious long-term 
effects, leaving only minor,short-term side-effects). 

Re natural-selection-comment comment "I was thinking more in terms of 
attractiveness to mates and number of
>offspring than surviving predators. ":-

Once fire was invented, not only would that have meant the removal of 
predators of other species as a real threat, but it would also have, to some 
extent, protected them from a harsh, cold climate. Those would have been the 
only 2 serious factors preventing humans from reaching breeding-age.

As for the issue of attractiveness to mates, much of the criteria used in the 
modern(and ancient) world as regards mates isn't really relevant to evolution. I 
mean a fat, physically weak and  unhealthy man who makes millions might well 
be considered more of a catch, but he could not really  be considered to be a 
benefit re evolution. 

But the clincher is that the more advanced the society becomes, technology-
wise, the easier it becomes to keep alive those who , in previous times, would 
have died out well before breeding-age(due to exposure etc.), thus speeding 
up the rate at which evolutionarily-disadvantageous traits appear in the 
population(and, thereby countering any evolutionarily-advantageous traits 
that might appear). Generally speaking, large boosts in evolution occur only 
among small, isolated populations which are also subject to intense natural 
selection-pressure(that consisting of predators and/or a harsh environment). 
Once those two factors are removed, natural selection becomes negligible.

Re:- Claim re 250,000 years/notion of grains being more difficult to adapt to 
than cooked foods:-

First of all, it is erroneous to suggest that eating cooked meats is less drastic 
than eating grains. After all, no wildlife species has ever made a clearly 
successful adaptation to cooked foods throughout the evolution of life on earth
(and judging from recent pet-food scandals etc., domesticated animals are 
also badly affected by cooked-foods). Yet, plenty of wildlife have switched, 
over millions of years, from eating one type of raw food such as (raw)fruit/
(raw) vegetables to eating another quite different type of raw food such as 
(raw)grains. Our own hominid ancestors took many millions of years to switch 
from eating raw insects to eating raw fruit, to eating raw vegetables, and 
finally to eating a mostly-raw-animal-food diet - and that long time to adapt 
was just on raw diets. Yet, we are expected to believe that a mere few 
hundred thousand years is enough to adapt(partially or fully) to an unnatural, 
unique cooked diet, devoid of enzymes and bacteria(all found in raw foods), 
and containing heat-created toxins such as advanced glycation end products 
etc.

Re 250,000 years claim:- 

The changes to human morphology at around the time homo sapiens turned up 
are very slight  by comparison to the vast changes to brain-size/facial shape  
etc. made during the time of homo erectus and homo habilis. In short, cooking 
does not seem to have influenced human evolution to any noticeable extent, 
other than the possibility of dental-health problems mentioned previously. With 
such a radical new food as cooked-food, one would expect much more drastic 
changes to human morphology than those which our hominid ancestors(homo 
habilis/homo erectus) incurred as a result of turning to raw-meat diets from 
raw vegetable-based ones. And, of course, any such slught changes as 
occurred in the last few hundred thousand years may well  have nothing to do 
with cooking, as such.
Geoff