This is all very interesting and much of it is probably correct. I did enjoy reading it. However, Dr. Loren Cordain's work should be read with much suspicion and cross checking, in my view.

Dr. Cordain failed to mention the consumption of animal bone either from broths or directly crushed and eaten. At least I didn't see it mentioned. This would make the amount of calcium available in the Paleo diet almost unlimited. Primitive peoples have been shown to consume bone by these methods.

Both Dr. Cordain and his friend, Dr. Eaton, have the fixation that hunter-gatherer peoples had a wide variety of fruit and vegetables in their diet. This may have been possible for people living in the South American amazon region but not so in most of the rest of the world. Even then, the variety is in serious doubt, and the fruit sugar content was probably much lower than the hybrid fruit found in our supermarkets. Cordain and Eaton also estimate a low fat consumption in the paleo diet on the basis that wild game flesh is lower in fats than our supermarket beef. They fail to realize that primitive people always preferred the fat because they didn't have the "saturated fat phobia" which clouds the minds of present day researchers. As an example: in Dr. Cordain's book, The Paleo Diet, he states that deer and bison meat has a low fat content. Yet, he also states that the entire carcass of a deer is 60% fat. The North American plains Indians made pemican from 45% dried meat, 45% fat and 10% died berries. This works out to be about 70% fat on a calorie basis and even higher when berries were not available. The Indians preferred the large slabs of fat from the backs of bison, deer and elk. They probably wasted some of the lean flesh in times of plenty when they were out of fat.

I have high respect for Sally Fallon at the Dr. Weston A. Price Foundation and you can read her highly critical review of Dr. Cordain's book at:

Sally Fallon's review of the book, The Paleo Diet, by Dr. Loren Cordain

Kent