"the fossil record of the Stone Age is so small and necessarily incomplete that its ability to tell us about paleolithic society is severely limited." Actually

"the fossil record of the Stone Age is so small and necessarily incomplete that its ability to tell us about paleolithic society is severely limited." Actually there are still people who live as hunter-gatherers, or there were until a couple of years ago, and that is where a lot of the information comes from. It was also possible to watch what happened when such people entered civilization. There also apparently is a marked difference in the fossil record concerning health of hunter-gatherers vs agricultural societies. I just read "The World Until Yesterday" by Jared Diamond, and he also touches on some of those health problems. Western people are actually less afflicted by them than those hunter-gatherers who entered 'civilization' in their lifetimes, so Diamond also says that Western people probably already evolved to some degree to deal better with the abundance of grains, salt and sugar. That doesn't imply we are already perfectly adapted, though, especially if some diseases clearly don't seem to be prevalent in traditional societies. Unfortunately he isn't very specific about the traditional diets, for example, and trying to look up paleo diets it seems to me a lot of time they are mostly an excuse to eat lots of meat and many books are not that well researched. In Diamond's books he mentions that many tribes actually ate mostly starches and meat only on special occasions - unfortunately he didn't mention the actual frequency, or I missed reading that (once a week? a month?). Also obviously humans adapted to lots of different environments, there are probably tribes who ate 100% meat, too (like in arctic regions where nothing grows?) - so maybe you can take your pick, or you just have to experiment... That lactose tolerance seems to have increased fitness a lot certainly makes me wary of just accepting "pure paleo" as the best path.