I've been out of pocket for the last few days and I wanted to comment on
pieces of Todd's excellent reply to my question below:

On Mon, 16 Sep 2002, Jim Swayze wrote:
Let me say this as well, Todd.  You seem to suggest a standard whereby
we eat whatever we want as long as it's not *proven* "non-paleo."  A
sort of dietary "innocent until proven guilty."  Is that, too, a
misreading of your message?

Todd > It depends on how you take "proven guilty."  In my opinion, if it
can be shown by plausible reasoning that a food was simply not available
to paleolithic people, then that's good enough reason to consider it
nonpaleo

Let me say something here which I think really needs to be cleared up.
You may not be saying this, but there's no requirement that we take a
photo of what folks were eating on March 3, 10,001 BC, the morning
before they picked up the first plow, in order to determine what is
"paleo" (a term I find sometimes more confusing than helpful).  A better
guide might be to ask whether a *class* of food would have been eaten
regularly enough and often enough by our ancestors in the, say, 2.5
million years we've been human.  It seems to me folly to require that it
be available just before the dawn of agriculture.  First, it was
possible that they were consuming stuff then that wasn't good for them
(such as the sap from poppy flowers).  And, second, they may not have
had available to them stuff that they'd been eating since time
immemorial.

To broaden this a little, another point that needs to be made is that it
seems to me it was probably not enough time for much adaptation to occur
even if a food were first eaten at the *beginning* of the
100,000-some-odd-year-period we call the "Paleolithic."  If old stone
age man had started his day 100,000 years ago with Cheerios and milk we
STILL would not be sufficiently adapted to it.  It makes sense to me
that our natural diet and tolerances were pretty much set before the
period even began.  So maybe paleo's a misleading term unless you
include the entire Paleolithic and take into consideration the couple of
million years or so before it began.

Todd > So, in my view, the first question to ask of a food is, Was it
available for some or much of the paleolithic era?  Was it there to be
eaten?

Again, the proper guide, I believe, is whether it was available and
eaten for long enough for adaptation to occur.  You would be correct to
say that fresh curd cheese in the stomachs of sucklings isn't
necessarily ruled out by this standard.

Todd > And the fact that some hunters are known to consume stomach
contents strengthens the case.

Yes it does.  But it's far from dispositive.  You've said elsewhere that
"some of the known problems associated with dairy intake are not
associated with cheese."  You or others may have already provided this
and I missed it, but CI'd love information on what exactly happens to
the milk proteins and sugars in the "cheesing" process, particularly
with rennet fermentation, that makes them suddenly good for us and
therefore part of a "paleo" diet.  I don't deny that cheese is better -
or at least less bad - than whole milk.   And even if you're right, that
some of the problems are lessened by cheese, that's *some* not all.