I strongly disagree with this...

From post "Introduction to Paloeolithic diet":
"Around 10,000 years ago, an enormous breakthrough was made- a breakthrough that was to change the course of history, and our diet, forever. This breakthrough was the discovery that cooking these foods made them edible- the heat destroyed enough toxins to render them edible. Grains include wheat, corn, barley, rice, sorghum, millet and oats. Grain based foods also include products such as flour, bread, noodles and pasta. These foods entered the menu of New Stone Age (Neolithic) man, and Paleolithic diet buffs often refer to them as Neolithic foods.

These advantages made it much easier to store and transport food. We could more easily store food for winter, and for nomads and travelers to carry supplies.

Paleolithic Diet buffs refer to the new foods as Neolithic foods and the old as Paleolithic Diet foods. In simple terms we see Neolithic as bad and Paleolithic as good.

The essentials of the Paleolithic Diet are:
Eat none of the following:

· Grains- including bread, pasta, noodles
· Beans- including string beans, kidney beans, lentils, peanuts, snow-peas and peas
· Potatoes ..."

I agree that much of the Paleolithic diet is good, but I think the authors have missed out on some of the more recent archaeological findings about ancient diets. Grinding stones are found in the Upper Paleolithic sites of Molodova I and V, Korman IV, Kosoutsy, and Ataki I and II, as well as many others in the Russian Plain, from 23,000 to 10,000 years ago. Many have microwear traces that match grass or other seed grinding practices, as well as possible nuts and roots. Bone digging implements may have been used for digging roots and bulbs, and stone cutting tools show wear indicative of cutting grass. Such stone plant processing tools go bak to the Middle Paleolithic in the Dnestr River area. These were people who hunted mammoth, horse, and reindeer. (Ilia Aleksandrovich Borziyak, Subsistence practices of Late Paleolithic groups along the Dnestr River and its tributaries, In, From Kostenki to Clovis: Upper Paleolithic Paleo-Indian Adaptations, edited by Olga Soffer and N. D. Praslov, Plenum Press, New York,1993.

At the Mesolithic (early Holocene, pre-Neolithic) hunter-gatherer site of Mirnoe in the northwest Black Sea region, archeologists have found thousands of small flint cutting blades that were hafted with bitumen into bone handles, and microwear studies show polish matching cutting of grasses and cane. The author theorizes wild grain harvesting with these sickle-like tools, and the species in this steppe environment may have included wild grasses, lambs quarter, knotweed, golden vetch (related to wild pea), providing the "Mesolithic hunters with the necessary carbons, starches, and vegetable fats missing in animal products. It is possible these seeds were stored in years of high yield" (p. 168, Galina Fedorovna Korobkova, The technology and function of tools in the context of regional adaptations, In, From Kostenki to Clovis: Upper Paleolithic Paleo-Indian Adaptation.).

The mammoth hunters of the Upper Paleolithic site of Dolni Vestonice, Moravia (eastern Europe), had sickle blades and grinding stones, and Walter Fairservis) thinks these people could have harvested such edible seeds as Wild cereal grass (Glyceria fluitans), Common reed (Phragmites communis), Bog bean (Menyanthes trifoliata), water nut (Trapanatans), as well as arctic berries (The Threshold of Civilization: An Experiment in Prehistory, Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1975). Identification of a plant food mush found amazingly preserved by a hearth at Dolni Vestonice II contained wood charcoal, tissues from roots and tubers, one seed, and possible acorn mush. These sites date from 27,000 to 24,000 ears ago. The main animal food hunted was reindeer, but mammoth remains are common also. (Clive Gamble, The Palaeolithic Societies of Europe, Cambridge World Archaeology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 2002.)

This was BEFORE agriculture, before the Neolithic, during stone age hunting phases.

Many Paleolithic sites also have pits dug into the ground in settlements, perhaps used for food storage, either frozen meat, bones full of marrow, or possibly grains or nuts.

In addition, Clovis hunters in North America (ca. 11-12,000 years ago) also used plant foods, something which is just coming to light with better archaeological methods: Seed-grinding stones have been found at Medicine Lodge Creek, the Betty Green site, Lookingbill, and the Myers-Hindman sites in the High Plains. The Medicine Lodge Creek site has at least 14 storage pits with the remains of food seeds: pine, junper, Opuntia cactus, prune, sunflower, and amaranth some charred. (Marcel Kornfield, Are Paleoindians of the Great Plains and Rockies subsistence specialists?, In, Foragers of the Terminal Pleistocene in North America, edited by Renee Walker and Boyce Driskell, University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 2007.)

These new findings are overthrowing the biased view of Pleistocene hunters as subsisting only on big game and meat. Plant foods do not preserve as well as bones, and just now are fine screening, delicate recovery methods being used to recover plant tissues.

I recommend the book Tending the Wild, by M. Kat Anderson, University of California Press: Berkeley, 2005, for detailed descriptions of the diets of stone age hunter-gatherer California Indians used a huge variety of plant foods, including digging for potato-like tubers, bulbs, rhizomes, and collected grass and wildflower seeds to make into pinole flour, unleavened bread cakes, and mush. Native grass grains collected include: Blue wildrye (Elymus glaucus), Desert needlegrass (Achnatherum speciosum), Purple needlegrass (Nassella pulchra), Wild barley (Hordeum brachyanttheum), Fescues (Festuca spp.), Lovegrass (Eragrostis spp.), brome grass (Bromus spp.), Melic grass (Melica spp.), and others. Seeds were often stored in granaries, and have been found in archeological contexts 1,000 year old.

Grains are not bad! Tubers are not bad! Humans have been collecting them for tens of thousands of years. Yes white flour is not good, but whole grains are a Paleolithic food.