I agree in principal with Sarah's comments & suspect, as Sarah mentioned, that most of our differences perhaps lie in the semantics of the argument. Clearly our ancestors were opportunistic and relied upon a wide variety of species (both plant and animal) to sustain themselves. The point to be made here is that the archaelogical data supports the clinical, biochemical and genetic data indicating that the human dietary experience with cereal grain consumption is quite recent and that our present day physiologies have not completely adapted to consumption of this ubiquitous food. As a discussion group, we have not even touched upon the role cereal grains have in inducing autoimmune disease (except for a few discussions upon celiac disease). There is substantial evidence (both epidemiological, and clinical) showing the role cereal grains may play in the aetiology of such diverse autoimmune diseases as MS, Insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM), rheumatoid arthritis, sjogrens syndrome, dermatitis herpetiformis, and IgA nephropathy. Although this proposal may at first seem preposterous, there is strong data to suggest that cereal grains may be involved in all of these diseases through a process of molecular mimicry whereby certain amino acid sequences within specific poly peptides of the gramineae family are homologous to a variety of amino acid sequences in mammalian tissue. These homologous amino acid sequences can ultimately confuse our immune systems so that it becomes difficult to recognize "self" from "non-self". When this happens, T-cells among other immune system components, launch an autoimmune attack upon a body tissue with AA sequences similar to that of the the dietary antigen. It seems that grass seeds (gramineae) have evolved these proteins with similarity to mammalian tissue to protect themselves from predation by mammals, vertebrates and even insects. This evolutionary strategy of molecular mimicry to deter predation or to exploit another organism has apparently been with us for hundred's of millions of years and is a quite common evolutionary strategy for viruses and bacteria. It has only been realized since about the mid 80's (Oldstone MBA. Molecular mimicry and autoimmune disease. Cell 1987;50:819-20) that viruses and bacteria are quite likely to be involved in autoimmune diseases through the process of molecular mimicry, and with a little bit of luck, our group will hopefully publish a review paper in the next 6 months or so compiling the evidence (and it is extensive) implicating cereal grains in the autoimmune process. As Dean mentioned, without the evolutionary template and without the evidence provided us by the anthropological community showing that cereal grains were not part of the human dietary experience, the idea that cereal grains had anything to do with autoimmune disease would probably had never occurred to us. This new electronic medium has allowed instant cross fertilization of disciplines which probably would have rarely occurred as recently as 5 yrs ago. Cordially, Loren