Have reminded myself of those days of yore and long ago when I was subjected to mugging up archaeology 101 for pre-med. The Palaeozoic Era was 570-354 million years ago, so Palaeofood is a misnomer. Man did not appear until perhaps the Pleistocene Epoch, which began 1.8 million years ago (I say 'perhaps' because that depends on what you define as 'man', Homo erectus, Neanderthal, H.sapiens?) Our area of study probably should begin when fire was tamed for cooking, supposedly about 40,000 years ago, but many of you may say your area of interest was before that. Could we have a definition, so we all know what we are talking about, and better still, are agreed on that? My interest is centered on the suspicion that we have been opportunistic hunter-gatherers for virtually all of our evolutionary life; we nibbled buds, fruits, nuts, leaves, roots, grain, insects, whatever, whenever we chanced on it, with only an occasional meat-feast for most of us. Only the river and sea-coast dwellers could have the luxury of a dependable continuous protein supply. So I suspect that three or four square meals a day is too new to have impinged on our evolutionary development, and our digestive tract may be to some extent unable to cope with that; certainly our insulin metabolism is insulted by the USA non-stop absorbtion of sugars-in-a carbonated water-can. So I would like to converse with people who nibble here and there whatever, with no set times, and rare pig-outs. A 5ft 11 elderly male who weighed 195 lbs, I am now at 165, and still going down. I nibble a hazel-nut of cooked sausage every hour on the hour, which I swallow almost unchewed to lengthen the absorbtion time. I have abandoned sucrose (table-sugar) and use fructose (honey-suagar) only occasionally. No, I'm not a diet-freak. I'm an MD who did not like being overweight, and wondered how best to lose it without re-lighting my old duodenal ulcer. This is working so far. Any comments? For a good short summary of prehistoric time periods, try http://www.fossil-company.com/time_line/index.html and also /caenozoic.html Geoff [log in to unmask]