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Old 11-01-2009, 07:36 PM   #21 (permalink)
chuckm
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I seriously question assertions 1 and 3. I don't have any reason to doubt 2. I'd put a huge asterisk on 4.
1) Typically about 80% of the paleolithic diet came from gathering. Gathering sufficient food to provide about 900 digestible calories per day, with enough variation to provide all the required nutrients probably took more than 2 hours, especially during winter. Hunting with primitive weapons is a dubious thing (anybody here ever tried to hunt with a spear? a bow and arrow made from sticks, a stone, and plant-fiber twine?) and probably involved much more than 2 hours a day and had a low success rate.
3) The sources I've found put paleolithic life expectancies between 33 and 54 (if you made it past 15 years old, you had a good chance of making it to 39-54). In the neolithic, life expectancy was about 20. Could you point me to your source?

Quote:
The above ONLY apply to those who were strictly hunter gatherer, not the hybreds like native americans who tended to also farm on the side.
The problem with that is that paleolithic populations were processing cereal grains for food some 23000 years ago, with evidence suggesting as early as 200,000 years ago (Piperno, D; Weiss, E., Hols, I., Nadel, D (2004), 200,000 years from People, Plants and Genes: The Story of Crops and Humanity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.). Everybody would be, as you termed it, a hybrid.

FYI, both the American Dietic Association and the National Health Service of England have designated the "Paleolithic diet" (aka caveman diet) as a fad diet.

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Last edited by chuckm; 11-01-2009 at 07:45 PM..
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