On Wed, 7 Feb 2001, Amadeus Schmidt wrote: > I welcome every book which finds different and better paleo-ways as just > demonizing "grains" and replacing them by mass agriculture food. I agree with you on this. One of the things that bothers me about Neanderthin, for example, is statements like "My definition of nature is *the absence of technology*." Technology, however, comprises any tools at all, including rocks and sharp sticks. Hominids have been using technology from at least as far back as homo erectus, and this technology has been for processing food. In fact, I would claim that human survival has depended on technology for as long as there have been humans (i.e., anything after australopithecus). And technology is a continuum, not something that appeared abruptly. Using stones to crack bones (or nut shells) to get marrow is a technology-dependent practice. Technology was definitely needed to obtain and process animal skins for clothing, without which humans would not have survived in the cold climates. In fact, the trend of recent discoveries has been to show that paleo technology was more sophisticated that we thought (For example, the discovery that seaworthy boats were built 700,000 years ago). There's a great debate about how old cooking is. In Neanderthin we are told it was the "end of the Paleolithic era" but in fact there is evidence that it was much earlier. (see http://www.discoveringarchaeology.com/0599toc/5feature3-fire.shtml, for example). In any case, it is also an illusion to suppose that cooking provides a sharp boundary between what is edible and what is inedible. Plant foods have various concentrations of antinutrients, toxins, and lectins, including the ones that we eat raw. The ones that we can't eat raw have higher concentrations of essentially these same substances (which Ann Brower Stahl calls "secondary compounds"). Technologies such as soaking and cooking reduce the levels of secondary compounds in some of these "inedible" foods to levels comparable to the "edible" ones. The notion that when we eat foods that have to be cooked we are consuming substances that were not present in our previous foods is not really true. Personally, I am certain that humans have been eating some grains (oats, millet) and some legumes (lentils, probably) for a very long time, "processing" them by the low-tech methods of soaking (and rinsing) and parching. I don't claim that these were staples or that it is good for them to dominate the diet. Even in Neanderthin we read (p. 57) "Almost no evidence exists that eating cooked beans will harm humans (except perhaps socially because of flatulence). That cooking is required to eat beans is enough, however, to exclude them from a Paleolithic diet." Even Ann Brower Stahl notes that *some* legumes are eaten raw by other primates, so the latter claim is false. And since the technology needed to make legumes edible was easily within reach of Paleolithic humans, there is really no good reason to exclude them altogether. Jean Auel's books may be very speculative in terms of what Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons were actually eating, but they are indeed an eye-opener for insight into what they *could* have been eating. Todd Moody [log in to unmask]