On Tue, 27 Mar 2001, Don Wiss wrote:

> Six thousand years of gathering is enough to evolve into farming what they
> have been gathering. There is no evidence of grain consumption before
> 17,000 years ago. It is pure conjecture on your part. The onus is on you to
> come up with evidence of grain consumption before that.

Why were they bothering to gather the grains if they weren't
accustomed to eating them?

You see, it's not just conjecture.  It's inference.  Now I grant
you that it's highly uncertain inference, but it's still
reasonable as far as it goes.  If people were gathering grains
17,000 years ago, it's reasonable to infer that they were eating
them even before that.  What makes it reasonable is the fact that
it is *not* reasonable to suppose that they took up gathering
something that they didn't eat.  They wouldn't invent tools for
grinding grain unless they thought that there was a reason to
grind grain.  Why would they think such a thing unless they
already knew that grains could be eaten?

On the other hand, if they were already eating grains once in a
while, it would make perfect sense to experiment with different
ways of processing them -- grinding, soaking, parching, whatever.
And if these methods produced satisfactory results, it would also
make sense to spend a little more time gathering them, and so
forth.

If humans were not eating grains at all, then the onus is on you
to explain why they would suddenly begin to spend time and energy
gathering them.  What would be the point?

Now, I've considered the opioid theory that you and Jean-Claude
favor, but I don't believe it is an adequate explanation, for two
reasons.  First, it is question-begging.  In order for the
alleged opiate-like effect of grains to explain the initial
expansion of gathering, and later cultivation, people had to be
already eating them.  Otherwise you are forced to suppose that
they started gathering them because they thought they just might
get a buzz.  In addition, I think the magnitude of opioid effect
is not nearly strong enough to explain the magnitude of the
dietary shift.  We're not talking about opium poppies or coca
leaves here.  We're probably talking about something like parched
millet or einkorn ground into crude matzohs.  So, while I might
grant that one could get a "comfort" feeling from eating this
stuff, it strains credulity to imagine that it was any better
than the sense of well-being that one gets from eating a steak or
a hunk of watermelon.

So, if you like to think of these two hypotheses as conjectures,
which is more believable, the theory that humans didn't eat
grains at all, but then started gathering them 17,000 years ago
for their opiate-like properties; or that they had been eating
them as a minor part of a continuously varied diet for as long as
they were in the grasslands, and made more intensive use of them
when, in the late paleolithic, the hunting yield started getting
smaller?

Todd Moody
[log in to unmask]


Do I have physical evidence that they ate grains, say, 100,000
years ago?  No.  Do you have physical evidence that they ate
cabbage, or grasshoppers, 100,000 years ago?  No.  But cabbage
and grasshoppers are considered paleo.  Why is that?  Two
reasons: They *could have* eaten them 100,000 years ago, and
modern HGs *do* eat them, using only stone age technology.  But
there is no direct evidence that they *did* eat cabbage or
grasshoppers.  And that reasoning is about as good as it ever
gets for many ostensibly paleo foods.

I don't question the premise that the shift to a grain-dominated
diet was and is a challenge to the health of human beings.  I do
question the claim that humans didn't eat grains at all during
their long omnivorous career.