Sheryl

Could you supply your references for use of fire by the genus homo? The
beyondveg web site goes into a in depth discussion of this and can find
no evidence to indicate that fire was used conistently before 125,000
years ago. Also, do you characterize homo habilis as physiologically
modern humans? I don't and neither do the paleo anthropologists I've
read. A whole lot of genetic change occurred between 2 mya and when homo
sapiens sapiens first appeared 100,000 years ago.

Mark


> For starters... all these numbers are estimates based on archeological
> findings, and science evolves over time.  So far the current best estimate of
> when a physiologically modern human first walked the earth is about 2 million
> years ago.  The earliest evidence of use of fire by humans is (at this time)
> about 1.5 million years ago.  That doesn't mean that they didn't use it
> earlier.  It means that they were using it AT LEAST 1.5 million years ago.
>
> Second... Think about what the theory of paleolithic nutrition says... The
> idea is not to eat what we ate BEFORE we evolved into physiologically modern
> humans.  If you look at it that way, then maybe we should try to match the
> diet of amoebas.  The theory behind paleolithic nutrition is that the foods
> that are eaten most frequently by humans on earth today (grains and milk
> products) were only introduced into our diets with the advent of agriculture,
> about 10,000 years ago.  From an evolutionary standpoint, 10,000 years is not
> very long.  Our bodies are not fully adapted to eating this way, and many
> health problems--some subtle, some not so subtle--are the result.  We are
> better adapted to the diet eaten by our species for the last million years
> than the last 10,000 years.
>
> Even assuming that the first physiologically modern humans didn't use fire
> for 500,000 years (and that's an assumption--the timing estimates are so
> close that they are well within a margin of error for being the same), it
> still makes no sense to say that we are healthiest eating what we ate for a
> 500,000 year span rather than what we ate for the 1.5 million years following
> that period.  If humans have used fire for 1.5 million years, then we are
> very well adapted to cooked food.
>
> > As for modern "paleo" people eating food raw, that's an entirely
> different discussion which has no place in the basic discussion of which
> foods could have been eaten by pre-tech humans.
>
> I disagree.  It's extremely relevant.  Eating raw meat--perhaps still warm
> from a kill--is not very appealing anyone I know, and I don't think it's just
> cultural habit.  Cooked meat tastes better to most of us (I assume there are
> exceptions, though I haven't met these people).  I'd hypothesize that this is
> body wisdom, and arises from our 1.5 million year history of eating cooked
> food.  I'd guess that our bodies are better adapted to eat certain foods
> cooked--for example, red meat.
>
>      - Sheryl