All kinds of wild foods were more readily available in ancient times, before the environment was damaged. It was easier to subsist by a hunting and gathering. Today most of the forests and wild lands are a shadow of what they used to be.
I am currently reading "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman
He writes about what the forests looked like before humans messed with them, and then how they might look if we stopped messing with them..... wonderful book.
There's other, better sources of information on how hunter-gatherers lived. The archaeologists I know tell me over and over that hunter-gatherers had an easier life than people do today; they could get all the food they needed working 2 or 3 days a week. The rest of the time they spent having dances and religious ceremonies.
But, there's too many people and not enough wildlife for us to revert to hunting and gathering.
--- In fast5@yahoogroups.com, Heather Twist <HeatherTwist@...> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 7:39 AM, hillrunner_tx <preedntx@...> wrote:
>
> >
> > Our diets for eons were probably closer to that of the apes. Again, just
> > head out for a few weeks in the wild and try to eat what the "paleo" people
> > claim is our original diet. Won't happen. You'll be subsiding on bugs,
> > rabbit, roots, fruits if available and the occasional deer or fish if you
> > learn how to kill or catch one. In fact, in the morning, you're looking for
> > water and the closest thing available to shove in your mouth, which is
> > usually food that can't run: plants. Quite similar to what the apes
> > consume.
> >
>
> You would be eating differently in the tropics though. There is a fair bit
> of evidence that our ancestors lived on the shoreline, and it is REALLY EASY
> to find food by the shoreline. Including high-sugar or high-starch fruit, if
> it's the tropics. You don't actually have to be agile enough to catch a
> rabbit: most kids can catch fish in their hands and shellfish don't run fast
> at all (nor snails). You wouldn't be "looking for" water, because you'd
> probably be camped next to it. Hauling water is not easy, which is why
> people live next to it if they have any choice in the matter.
>
> Arrowroot, a potato-like tuber, grows in huge swaths and all you need to do
> to harvest it is to pull up the plant. Also taro and other yams.
>
> These foods are harvested by apes and monkeys too, but they contain more
> calories if they are cooked. The date of the first use of fire keeps getting
> pushed back, and it's pretty clear that our jaws are designed for way softer
> foods than what chimps eat (i.e. we either need our food cooked, or we need
> a blender or good knives). The need for cooking food to extract calories
> from it is one reason I think it was more a Fast-5 scenario than a "graze
> all day" scenario.
>
> Anyway, my take is that if you want to look at "what our ancestors probably
> ate" it would be closer to what they eat in say, Vietnam or Thailand, than
> in what the survival books talk about. The survival books are mostly based
> on North American forests, which are a really different place. Of course
> many of us on this list are of Northern European extraction, so you could
> look at what THEY ate. But 5,000 years ago they were already eating barley
> and herding goats probably:
>
> http://www.mummytombs.com/otzi/meals.htm
>
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