Why famine only?  Tubers are a high energy density food. They are not unduly difficult to gather. The Expensive Tissue hypothesis, which I accept, stipulates that the evolutionary decrease in the gut-brain ratio depends on a higher density diet. I believe meat must have dominated but I don't see any reason to suppose it did so to the exclusion of other high density foods, such as tubers. Moreover, the fact that cooking shows up about 25-50,000 years before homo sapiens, but a long time before the Neolithic, is at least suggestive. I understand that paleolithic tubers would have been pretty gnarly in comparison with modern selectively bred mega-starches but I just don't see any reason to think that paleo people ignored them. 



Todd Moody



-----Original Message-----

From: Geoffrey Purcell <[log in to unmask]>



Date:         Mon, 12 May 2008 12:59:33 

To:[log in to unmask]

Subject: Re: Stone-age diet may lower risk of heart disease





I'm not disputing that Palaeo hunters may have sometimes eaten tubers in 

times of famine etc., but it seems clear that it was never a mainstay of the 

human diet until the Neolithic.







On Mon, 12 May 2008 13:04:30 +0000, Todd Moody <[log in to unmask]> 

wrote:



>The controversy about Wrangham's hypothesis is not whether paleo people 

ate tubers at all. It's about whether tuber consumption was on a scale that 

could explain rapid brain evolution a couple of million years ago. Personally, I 

think the answer is no; I think meat played that role. But that question isn't 

decisive for the question about whether tubers were eaten by paleo people.

>

>The evidence for cooking becomes clear at around 250,000 year ago. This is, 

by most estimates, just before the dawn of anatomically modern homo 

sapiens. It is certainly well within the "paleo" time frame, by any plausible 

definition. Furthermore, as Wrangham pointed out, there are tubers that are 

edible raw. So there is really very little reason to doubt that paleo people ate 

some tubers, in some places, some of the time. That, of course, doesn't 

translate into a license to follow a "tuber based" paleo diet in the belief that it 

has some kind of scientific basis.

>

>Todd Moody

>[log in to unmask]