Post-contact Inuit cooked, IIRC according to Stefansson because they 
thought that white men could not live on raw. Some here apparently 
believe the same. Pre-contact, they had neither pots not reason to use them.

The plentiful seal oil burns with a flame so smoky that the walls of 
their snow houses were black inside - probably their lungs were black 
too. This is a low temperature flame. I would really like to have 
someone try cooking on seal oil before making  claims that it is possible.

I use snow for insulation every winter. So did the Inuit.
I use wood for heat, they used human body heat, as their dwelling places 
were small enough.

Eating cooked food makes man sick. We have spent 12,000 years proving 
this beyond all doubt, so this endless insistance that paleolithic man 
cooked becomes boring.

William

Paleo Phil wrote:
> Paleo Phil wrote:
>   
>>> Can you name a
>>> single hunter-gatherer people which never eats cooked food? 
>>>       
>   
> William wrote:
>   
>> Unlikely that they had any cooked at all during the long Arctic winter, 
>> as they had no fuel other than the moss used for female "hygiene",  and 
>> if we consider the easily observed results of eating cooked, why would 
>> they bother?
>>     
>
> Actually, the Inuit had seal and whale oil to heat and cook with during the
> winter, which was their main fuel source. It was also used during the summer
> (such as when they coated bones with the oil and used the oiled bones to
> make cooking and heating fires).
>
> So you can't think of a single people that never cooked their food? Not even
> the healthy traditional Inuit or Nenets or other hunter gatherer groups that
> are pointed to here as paragons of good health? Well, that's not surprising,
> because even Vilhjalmur Stefansson talked about Inuit cooking and heating.
> Here are some examples from Adventures in Diet by Stefansson:
>
>   
>> "They themselves ate boiled fish."
>>     
>
>   
>> "In the morning, about seven o'clock, winter-caught fish, frozen so hard
>>     
> that they would break like glass, were brought in to lie on the floor till
> they began to soften a little. One of the women would pinch them every now
> and then until, when she found her finger indented them slightly, she would
> begin preparations for breakfast. First she cut off the head and put them
> aside to be boiled for the children in the afternoon...." 
>
>   
>> "Also we came home to a dwelling so heated by the cooking that the
>>     
> temperature would range from 85 degrees to 100 degrees F. or perhaps even
> higher - more like our idea of a Turkish bath than a warm room. Streams of
> perspiration would run down our bodies, and the children were kept busy
> going back and forth with dippers of cold water of which we naturally drank
> great quantities."
>
> ============
>
> Geoffrey Purcell wrote: Whether any native-tribe eats a 100% raw diet or
> not, is irrelevant. 
>
> It is very relevant as part of an analysis of your claim that "it is highly
> unlikely that tubers were a significant part of the diet before c.250,000
> years ago, when cooking was invented." The three main areas of evidence re:
> diet that are looked at are 1) what traditional hunter gatherers encountered
> in modern times do/did, 2) what the paleontological/archaeological record
> shows and 3) morphological changes in human anatomy. 
>
> 1) Modern hunter-gatherer diets and practices:
>
> The fact that No hunter gatherer tribe has ever been encountered that eats a
> 100% raw diet means that your claim is not necessarily established beyond
> all doubt in the first area of evidence. Plus, if cooking was a serious risk
> to health, as William sometimes suggests, we would expect to find at least
> one hunter-gatherer tribe over the last 100,000 years that only ate raw,
> given that in the wild only the fit tend to survive and procreate. Also,
> there are multiple hunter gatherer tribes who cook and eat wild yams (such
> as the San bushmen, the Yanomamo, the Hadza and the Australian Aborigines).
> You can read about hunter-gatherer cooking practices and mention of yam
> consumption here: "Cooking practices of hunter-gatherers,"
> http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cooked/raw-cooked-3e.shtml.
>
> Vis-a-vis those who advocate a 100% raw Paleo diet (and I'm not saying that
> anyone here necessarily does). If raw eating is so essential and cooked food
> so unhealthy, how is it that the healthy Inuit, and even the Nenets, ate
> some of their food cooked even before civilization encroached on them? All
> I'm saying is that it may not be necessary to be so extreme about the diet.
> Raw is good, but it doesn't appear necessary to be 100% raw.
>
> 2) The paleontological record:
>
> In the second area of evidence, digging sticks that could have been used to
> dig up yams have been found going back hundreds of thousands of years. 
>
> Solid evidence of hearths, "with stones or bones encircling patches of dark
> ground or ash," has been dated up to 250,000 years ago in several sites in
> southern Europe. Charred bones, stones, ash, and charcoal dated 300,000 to
> 500,000 years ago and found at sites in Hungary, Germany, and France have
> also been assigned to hearths. [Food for Thought, by Ann Gibbons, Science,
> 15 June 2007,
> http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/316/5831/1558?ijkey=qZN/4mNiv/hng&keytype=ref&siteid=sci]
>
> The earliest evidence of controlled use of fire comes from various
> archaeological sites in East Africa, such as red clay shards dated back 1.42
> million years before the present. [James, Steven R. (February 1989).
> "Hominid Use of Fire in the Lower and Middle Pleistocene: A Review of the
> Evidence". Current Anthropology (University of Chicago Press) 30 (1): 1--26.
> doi:10.1086/203705, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/203705]
> The idea that cooking was not adopted until a million or more years after
> the controlled use of fire seems highly dubious.
>
> 3) Morphological changes in human anatomy:
>
> In the third area of evidence, Wrangham points out that there were
> morphological changes (such as decline in jaw and teeth size) in
> proto-humans some 1.9 million or more years ago that suggest the adoption of
> a softer diet, due to either the cooking of foods or a switch to softer,
> easier-to-shred-and-chew foods. I remain skeptical of Wrangham's arguments,
> but I cannot dismiss them without providing counter-evidence.
>
> When we look at the fact that the last major human morphological changes
> occurred around 100 - 150,000 years ago and that Eaton, Cordain, Audette and
> others believe that the human foods of this time period are therefore the
> ones we are best adapted to, and that this was well after the 250,000 years
> ago that Geoffrey mentioned, cooking tubers does not seem so far fetched
> after all. I don't know whether yams and other tubers were staple Stone Age
> foods or not, but the cooking argument falls flat in the face of
> overwhelming evidence.
>
> My current guess is that yams and other tubers were generally "fallback
> foods" (and Wrangham even calls them this). So, even though they were
> probably cooked and consumed by the earliest homo sapiens, and even earlier
> proto-humans, they did not become staple foods among large population groups
> until closer to 10-30,000 years ago. This would explain why it seems that
> modern humans are partially, but not fully, adapted to digesting cooked
> tubers. Adaptation to eating cooked meats seems much more advanced, based on
> the evidence. However, the evidence regarding cooked yams is still
> sufficiently unclear that I cannot rule out that they might have been a
> staple food of the Paleolithic era. This would then raise the question of
> why we don't seem to be fully adapted to them.
>
> Here is more from Wrangham and Greg Laden:
>
> <<We propose that a key change in the evolution of hominids from the last
> common ancestor shared with chimpanzees was the substitution of plant
> underground storage organs (USOs) for herbaceous vegetation as fallback
> foods. Four kinds of evidence support this hypothesis: (1) dental and
> masticatory adaptations of hominids in comparison with the African apes; (2)
> changes in australopith dentition in the fossil record; (3) paleoecological
> evidence for the expansion of USO-rich habitats in the late Miocene; and (4)
> the co-occurrence of hominid fossils with root-eating rodents. We suggest
> that some of the patterning in the early hominid fossil record, such as the
> existence of gracile and robust australopiths, may be understood in
> reference to this adaptive shift in the use of fallback foods. Our
> hypothesis implicates fallback foods as a critical limiting factor with
> far-reaching evolutionary effects. This complements the more common focus on
> adaptations to preferred foods, such as fruit and meat, in hominid
> evolution.>> Tuber or not tuber? Rats are the question,
> http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/early_hominids/diet/laden_wrangham_tuber_2005.html
>
> =====
>
> As far as the Inuit diet being an extreme outlier as compared to the
> majority of Paleolithic diets, I believe Steve is right about that, as I
> mentioned before. The Inuit diet is not the only hunter-gatherer diet and is
> not representative of the majority of hunter-gatherer diets of either the
> modern or Paleolithic eras. I think some people mistakenly equate the
> (Greenland) Inuit diet with the Paleo diet because Ray Audette and
> Stefansson featured it. It is only one of many hunter-gatherer ways of
> eating. Some people do not realize that even among the Inuit and other
> Northern Canadian tribes there was diet variation. Some ate more berries and
> other plant foods than others, depending on what flora and fauna were
> available in their particular latitude and geography.
>
>
>