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
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