On Fri, 9 Jan 2009 15:07:10 +0000, Geoffrey Purcell
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The problem with the notion that tubers were a mainstay of the
Palaeolithic Diet is that most need to be cooked etc. in order to be
remotely absorbable by the human body( a good example being cassava, which
is a staple food in many African countries and contains cyanide-based
compounds when raw). So, it is highly unlikely that tubers were a
significant part of the diet before c.250,000 years ago, when cooking was
invented.
-----Original Message-----
From: Geoffrey Purcell <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Fri, 9 Jan 2009 11:07 pm
Subject: Re: A qustion for fans of Vilhjalmur Stefansson fans
... So, it is highly unlikely that tubers were a significant part of the
diet before c.250,000 years ago, when cooking was invented.
This has been discussed here multiple times before. 250,000 is the lowest
widely accepted number. Richard Wrangham proposes that cooking began 1.9
million or more years ago:
THE EVOLUTION OF COOKING: A TALK WITH RICHARD WRANGHAM [2.28.01]
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_print.html
<<According to Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham, almost
two million years ago humans emerged from a stock of pre-human apes.
Remarkably, our species is still evolving today, faster than ever. "Why we
evolved then, and why we are still changing, are problems that shape our
souls," he says.
Wrangham believes that humanity was launched by an ape learning to cook. In
a burst of evolution around two million years ago, our species developed the
family relations that make us such a peculiar kind of animal. ...
WRANGHAM: There are two really fascinating things about human evolution that
we have yet to really fully come to grips with. One is the evolution of
cooking. Whenever cooking happened, it must have had absolutely monstrous
[major] effects on us, because cooking enormously increases the quality of
the food we eat, and it enormously increases the range of food items that we
can eat. We all know that food quality and food abundance are key variables
in understanding animal ecology. But the amazing thing is that although at
the moment there is no conventional wisdom that says when cooking evolved,
social anthropology and all sorts of conventional wisdom say that humans are
the animals that cook. We distinguish ourselves from the rest of the world
because they eat raw stuff and we eat cooked stuff. The best anthropology
can do at the moment is to say that maybe sometime around 250 or 300
thousand years ago cooking really got going, because there's archeological
evidence of earth ovens.
This is fine, but long before earth ovens came along we must have learned to
cook. And you would think that cooking would be associated with things like
evidence in your body of the food being easier to digest, such as smaller
teeth, or maybe a reduction in the size of the rib cage as the size of the
stomach gets smaller, or maybe the jaw getting smaller. And there's only one
time in human evolution that all that happens; that is, 1.9 million years
ago with the evolution of the genus Homo. It's there we must look for
evidence that cooking was adopted. ...>>
> Also, from what I understand, most of the Australian megafauna was
completely wiped out c.40,000- 50,000 years ago, probably by the Aborigines
themselves, so it would make sense if they then went in for
tuber-/root-consumption as a substitute in the face of potential starvation
re lack of meats.
Yes, scientists believe that aboriginal Australians hunted all the big game
animals of Australia to extinction tens of thousands of years ago, which
means that their diet became an extreme outlier (more plant foods than
normal), just as the Greenland Inuit diet is also an extreme outlier (more
animal foods than normal) due to the harsh climate. Most Paleolithic peoples
had diets that lay in between these extremes.
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