Okay, here's the address again to the Wiki. I'm going to start sending out the passwords to those who are interested.

Please, what I have started is just my particular brand of organizing. Please edit until your paleo mind is content!

http://paleo.pbwiki.com/

Remember, send me a PM for the password.

If coconuts are 15mya they are far older than any hominid species. The human ancestral line (genus Homo) didn't start until about 2.5mya. I did a bit of googling too and it seems the new consensus is that coconuts are indigenous to SE Asia, which I believe was populated pretty early on (see Java Man - one of my old geology professors at Rutgers, Carl Swisher, actually dated this fossil himself at 1.7mya). Why do you strike tomatoes and peppers off the list?

I love the term you coined... APE.

Kallyn, the reason I take all three off the list is that that none of them would have been eaten in my ancestral line.

If anyone here is significantly Far Eastern or Native American in origin then I'd say go ahead, but few or none of my ancestors are likely to have encountered those foodstuffs (or anything similar) more than a few hundred years back.

I'd have to contend, however, that we are still the same species. Well, I've been called several various names for subspecies before, but....

LondonIan, for something like this please go ahead and qualify it in the wiki. I don't want to be the only one in there editing, it's too much dang work!

Let's go APE.

What about lard? Presumably in Paleo times they could have rendered the fat and saved it in a animal skin bag. Also shouldn't the veggies, nuts and fruit be in season, either in the area we are living in or our ancestor's area? This would of course require more research. It'd also be easier to do this in late summer or early fall. Does anyone know of a good website or book which might have this info?

If you can find a local farmer's market, anything they sell will be currently in season.

Yeah, but you could have had an ancestor 1.7mya eating coconuts and there'd be no way to tell. You could be supremely adapted to coconuts and not know it! I would argue that they are significantly more paleo than a lot of the veggies we currently eat which are the products of selective breeding and hybridization.

Do we need to get bogged down in the debate of what the ideal diet is for each individual? I don't think we need to come to any sort of concensus, IMHO. I would think the idea is that we each have an idea of what our most perfect diet would be and we strive to do that for a week.

Personally I'm not interested in doing this to make historians and anthropologists happy, I'm doing it to see how it makes me feel.

I think you just said what I was trying to get at. It seems like people want to make choices based on their own situation, but apply them to everyone, which I don't agree with. It's fine if people don't want to eat coconuts or tomatoes because of whatever their own reasons are, but that's no reason to preclude them for everyone.

Ah well, maybe I misunderstood the experiment - I don't have any big axe to grind over daily foods. I thought we were trying to work out what a 'purist' diet might be and spend a week on it to compare to our normal diets. If it appears that criticising anyone food choices, I'm not. I was just taking this as a little experimental archaeology.

It would have to have meant some poor H. Erectus schlepped all the way back to Africa and rejoined the gene pool there.

They haven't had coconut palms in africa at some point? Remember, the climate has changed a lot over a long period of time and coconuts are good at traveling across oceans.

I wish, but not likely. There is a small possibilty of an early presence in East Africa.
http://www.palms.org/principes/1994/coconut.htm

Ah, hell, let us eat the 'nuts if we want to!

I think we may have a similar debate about the nightshades. I've been wanting to eliminate them for a while, so while I wouldn't exclude them (except potatoes) I might personally try to eliminate them during the experiment, just to see what happens.