On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 05:49:45 -0600, Robert Kesterson <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 01:46:27 -0600, Keith Thomas <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> Another of my pets is nuts. I eat only nuts that I have cracked from the  
>> shell.  Preferably in season, too. (Walnut season here in three months!)
>
>I can see the "in season" argument for some things, but why would nuts  
>need to be eaten in season?  It doesn't take any technology at all to  
>gather a pile of nuts when they fall off the tree, and munch on them all  
>winter long.  Even squirrels do so.

In fact, there is evidence of nut eating predating humans:

Source: National Science Foundation

Posted: May 24, 2002

Nut-Cracking Chimps: First Primate Archaeological Dig Uncovers New Tool
Development Links
A study of chimpanzees' use of hammers to open nuts in western Africa may
provide fresh clues to how tools developed among human ancestors. 

A paper published in the May 24 issue of the journal Science documents the first
archaeological examination of a non-human primate workplace and establishes new
links between the use of tools by chimpanzees and similar developments among
human ancestors (hominids). The research was supported in part by the National
Science Foundation (NSF). The research site is in the Tai Forest, about 375
miles west of the capital of the Ivory Coast, Abidjan. 

A team from George Washington University (GWU) and the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology of Leipzig, Germany (which provided the primary
funding for the work) studied a site where chimpanzees had carried in stone
hammers from nearby areas to open nuts on tree roots, which they used as anvils.
The researchers last fall, recovered 479 stone pieces, chips of granite,
laterite, feldspar and quartz broken from the hammers. 

"Some of the stone by-products of the chimpanzee nut cracking are similar to
what we see among the technologically simplest Oldowan [hominid] sites in East
Africa," said rainforest archaeologist Julio Mercader of GWU, the lead author of
the journal article, titled "Excavation of a Chimpanzee Stone Tool Site in the
African Rainforest." 

Other scholars have documented similarities between the hammers used by
chimpanzees to open nuts and those used by hominids, but no researchers have
used the techniques of human archaeology on non-human primate sites, Mercader
said. 

The researchers have proved "archaeology to be a feasible method of uncovering
past chimpanzee sites and activity areas in rainforest environments. This
introduces the possibility of tracing the development of at least one aspect of
ape culture through time," said Mercader, a visiting assistant professor at GWU.
Melissa Panger, a GWU post-doctoral research fellow who receives support through
NSF's Integrative Graduate education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program,
said the discovery could help archaeologists establish new dates for tool
development. She and Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology co-authored the paper with Mercader. 

"We know that flaked stone tools were used 2.5 million years ago, but stone
tools may have been used by hominids as much as 5 million years ago," Panger
said. "If we look for assemblages of stone pieces like those we have found left
behind by the chimpanzees, we can infer that those assemblages may relate to
tool use, even if we don't have the tools themselves." 

Mark Weiss, NSF program director for physical anthropology said, "Understanding
the activities of our early ancestors involves a lot of detective work.
Mercader, Panger and Boesch's work is an ingenious approach to trying to tease
out more information from the archaeological record-trying to flesh out the
context of the earliest flake assemblages."