Yes, the oceans have always been a dumping place for contaminants, but the scale of what we are doing in 2002 represents a TOTALLY different situation from where Homo sapiens was for the previous 99% of its evolution. As John Gray wrote in his recent superb essay: <The lush natural world in which humans evolved is being rapidly transformed into a largely prosthetic environment>. (Full text at http://www.evfit.com/population.htm). Indeed, it appears that we have passed a number of key thresholds already in terms of biodiversity destruction. To take a local example that was in the news today, here in Australia, fertilizer runoff from the cane fields of Queensland is changing the chemisty and biomass content of the seawater and destroying the Great Barrier Reef. From a narrower Paleofood perspective, the artificial hormones fed to beef cattle and the antibiotics they have to get into those cattle to protect them from infection in the unnatural environment of the feedlot is a good example of where, despite our position as <top predator>, our physiology is quite unprepared for this sort of onslaught. There are plenty more examples, and that's why we are here as members of this list. Keith