On Sun, 25 Mar 2001, Don Wiss wrote:

> >Wheat is paleo, because hunter gatherers gather grass seed, and wheat is
> >grass.
>
> No. First you can't easily gather wheat. Prior to man's selective breeding,
> all of the seeds spontaneously fell off when ripe. And with their points
> they would stick into the ground. Then processing is required to make the
> seeds edible. They have to be ground. Grinding leaves behinds tools as
> evidence. The evidence found so far is in the Near East they started
> gathering grains 17,000 years ago. Some have argued that they ground the
> grains with their teeth. Well, maybe, but you couldn't have consumed more
> than a token amount of them.

I can't comment on wheat in particular, but we've certainly
discussed this before, and I think it's reasonable to conclude

(a) paleolithic humans consumed some amounts of grain for a very
long time, probably not as a staple but as an adjunct.  (b)
Grains do not have to be ground; they can be soaked or parched,
as Amadeus pointed out.  These techniques do not require the use
of tools that would survive to the present day. (c) They can be
gathered efficiently when conditions are right.  (d) The very
fact that people finally began cultivating grains presupposes
that they were accustomed to eating them.   It makes no sense to
suppose that they would cultivate crops that they didn't eat.

None of this is meant to argue that paleolithic people had
anything approaching a "grain-based" diet, but only that, as
usual, all-or-nothing thinking fails here.  One of the premises
of the whole paleodiet idea is that ancient humans had to have
figured out how to survive in the grasslands, where no other
primates live.  That certainly means hunting the herbivores that
thrive in the grasslands; no question about that.  We seem to be
able to accept that these rather unimposing primates had the
ingenuity to hunt, kill, and butcher animals, using simple stone
tools.  Why is it so difficult to imagine that they also had the
ingenuity to exploit the grasses themselves, by gathering,
soaking, and/or parching grains?

Todd Moody
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