On Sun, 11 May 2008 16:24 Geoffrey Purcell wrote: >I'm afraid you're labouring under a misapprehension. Modern "hunter-gatherer" >societies are NOT "palaeolithic", they are Neolithic, as indeed is any tribe from >10,000 BC onwards, from a hsitorical point of view. As soon as they adopted >Neolithic-era practices such as eating grains, tubers (or in the case of the >Masai, drinking raw dairy) etc., they no longer can be considered Palaeolithic >even from a purely dietary context, in any way, by definition. I must disagree here, Geoffrey. Australian Aborigines were Palaeolithic through to their first contact with Europeans and a number of desert tribes were Palaeolithic through to the early 20th century and I recall well the last small tribal group to make first contact in 1984. These latter were Pintupi and wholly nomadic hunter-gatherers and so did not use any agricultural practices. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pintupi_Nine Note the medical examination of this group's physical condition. Nothing happened in Australia ~10,000 years ago that marked the transition from Palaeolithic to Neolithic which occurred at that time in Papua New Guinea, South/Central America or the fertile crescent. There is a nice picture of Bathurst Islanders on Wikipedia. A photo like this proves nothing, but it depicts people who look pretty much like hunter-gatherers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Australians Keith