Hello Wally,

Re the great debate you want to have with me... Not interested.  You (and 
your defenders) are entitled to your opinion--of me, and of you.  I have my 
own opinions, and feel no need to defend myself.  Fire away if it amuses you. 
 I don't intend to respond to you on that level.  You and I both know that 
nothing I say will change the way you interact.  In fact, when I comment on 
it, you just get worse.  So I will not discuss this any further.

> Well... you say that the information you accept shows that humans evolved
to virtually their current state about 2 million years ago, and that they
then managed to survive without fire for about a half million years
beyond that.  Of course, during that period, they would not have had
access to any of the foods which requires fire to make them edible.  Of
course, that means that not only did they evolve for millions of years
without those "non-paleo" foods, but they also managed to survive quite
well for a heck of a long time after becoming fully human.

At least there is some interesting content here.  I can respond to this.

For starters... all these numbers are estimates based on archeological 
findings, and science evolves over time.  So far the current best estimate of 
when a physiologically modern human first walked the earth is about 2 million 
years ago.  The earliest evidence of use of fire by humans is (at this time) 
about 1.5 million years ago.  That doesn't mean that they didn't use it 
earlier.  It means that they were using it AT LEAST 1.5 million years ago.

Second... Think about what the theory of paleolithic nutrition says... The 
idea is not to eat what we ate BEFORE we evolved into physiologically modern 
humans.  If you look at it that way, then maybe we should try to match the 
diet of amoebas.  The theory behind paleolithic nutrition is that the foods 
that are eaten most frequently by humans on earth today (grains and milk 
products) were only introduced into our diets with the advent of agriculture, 
about 10,000 years ago.  From an evolutionary standpoint, 10,000 years is not 
very long.  Our bodies are not fully adapted to eating this way, and many 
health problems--some subtle, some not so subtle--are the result.  We are 
better adapted to the diet eaten by our species for the last million years 
than the last 10,000 years.

Even assuming that the first physiologically modern humans didn't use fire 
for 500,000 years (and that's an assumption--the timing estimates are so 
close that they are well within a margin of error for being the same), it 
still makes no sense to say that we are healthiest eating what we ate for a 
500,000 year span rather than what we ate for the 1.5 million years following 
that period.  If humans have used fire for 1.5 million years, then we are 
very well adapted to cooked food.

> As for modern "paleo" people eating food raw, that's an entirely
different discussion which has no place in the basic discussion of which
foods could have been eaten by pre-tech humans.

I disagree.  It's extremely relevant.  Eating raw meat--perhaps still warm 
from a kill--is not very appealing anyone I know, and I don't think it's just 
cultural habit.  Cooked meat tastes better to most of us (I assume there are 
exceptions, though I haven't met these people).  I'd hypothesize that this is 
body wisdom, and arises from our 1.5 million year history of eating cooked 
food.  I'd guess that our bodies are better adapted to eat certain foods 
cooked--for example, red meat.

     - Sheryl