A lot! fist off, it would enable early humans to survive if one food source ran out. It would also help them to migrate to areas with other food stuffs if necessary. In the case of plants it is important to eat a variety in order not to get overloaded on some plants naturally toxicity.

I just read an article this morning about crocodiles in South Africa that were dying from a disease called yellow fatty disease, because they had an overabundance of monosaturated fat in their bodies. It is theoretically possible for humans to get it too, although not likely since we eat a variety of foods.

Understood, but I thought we were talking about whole nuts versus smashed nuts.

We are, but they didn't call it the stone age for nothing. They COULD have used stones to pulverize nuts if they had a need to do so. However, I agree that they probably didn't have a NEED to smash the nuts, but then again WE are not living in the stone age and like I said our need is for the same nutrition, not necessarily the same methods and "recipes."

Umm, some nuts get smashed when you crack the outer shell. Even with a nut cracker, many nuts I have today get smashed to bits. It is a simple step to go from eating the little smashed up pieces, to pressing the mashed particles onto our fingers and licking them clean.

Or maybe, like some people in africa still do, and yes I know peanuts are not nuts, to throwing them into a pot, where they get mushed in the cooking. Having that taste good. Going from just smashing the nuts to actively mashing the nuts and then going on to some more creative use of our brains to make correlations about smashed/mashed/cooked/raw nuts as food. And just plain being curious and trying different things out.

I could make up a lot of reasons why it is evolutionary, but rather than pulling factoids out of our posteriors maybe it'd be more useful to look and see if HG's do any sort of food processing.

I don't think every piece of behavior is some how determined by some huge genetic advantage. There are traits that are linked. Like female pheasants prefer males with whiter tail feathers. Why? Well, perhaps the tail feathers the gene controlling the tail feathers is also responsible for making strong lungs, who knows?

Not that it'd make any difference to me. I'll continue to use nut flours (on rare ocassions, as nuts irritate my gut).

I realize that the original post was about nut flours and whether any hunter gatherer group has ever used them. I don't know the answer to that, but asking the tough questions will be necessary if we want to be taken seriously. Currently, we don't even have guesses as to WHY or HOW hunter gatherers would make nut flour. Anyone?

We can rewrite evolutionary theory right here on this humble diet forum, or we can go with it. We can try to get closer to a yes or a no on each question raised using the theory, and I find that interesting, and I believe the original poster does, too.

Articshark, I want to hear more! While we can understand processing plants so that they are edible (or less poisonous), what value is there to "just plain being curious and trying different things out"?

Seriously, you can't figure out how they'd do it? Take a few nuts, place them on a rock with a dent in the middle, like perhaps a mortar. Take a heavy stick or rock, shaped something like a pestle, and smash away. We still use mortar and pestles. It isn't rocket science and it isn't soooo much work that it'd wipe out a tribe that used them.

Why? Maybe someone thought nuts and honey would be tasty together but the honey is kind of hard to put on whole nuts. Hmm... grind them up and mix them together and make instant cookies.

Then one day someone left the cookies on the rock too close to the fire and the honey got a little carmelized. Hmmm... tastes good!

Why does the otter go to all the trouble to open up shellfish (using a rock) when they could probably eat something less troublesome?

Seriously, I could yank stuff like this out of my hind end all day long, I suspect you can yank counter-arguments out of your hind end all day long too.

Seems to me that would make more of a nut butter. How would they get it into flour?

I guess you haven't done much cooking.

Put some nuts into a food processor and turn it on. What happens? First the nuts shatter into smaller fragements, then they get smaller again. Eventually they get really tiny and release oil and start to stick together, but before they get to that stage it forms a meal. If you go to most health food stores you'll find nut flours. If you spent any time in the cooking forums here you'd notice that people grind their own nuts into meal, or flour, all the time using simple coffee/spice grinders. They stop grinding before it gets too oily.

And you'll probably notice that most nut butters have oil added to them, because there just isn't enough oil in nuts alone to make a butter.

Seriously, take a macadamia nut. It's quite soft, it's also very high in fat. Smash it. Does it turn into nut butter?

Ummm because we are human and curious by nature. I mean, there are people out there that do all sorts of crazy new things. Why wouldn't paleo man be just as curious. Isn't curiosity and learning of new things the way we evolved? Found that round objects can be moved easier than square ones. That some food taste better than others and could sometimes kill you. Isn't it possible that it is just a part of our own nature to try a something and if it worked better than our last tool, to use it again and that sometimes we were just messing around when we discovered something.

When paleo man learned to process plants, he didn't do it from a manual. I bet he watched some people get sick eating plants one way and other people not get sick if they ate a plant another way. The whole way I think we still do things today. Well I bet the smashed nuts tasted as good to someone as whole nuts. And I bets at some point, someone mashed then om purpose and found it was just as good. And having to actually move to get food or when danger lurked, I could see where mashed nuts would be quickly scooped up and taken somewhere drying in the process or left in a location and by the time returning was possible, it being all dried up. And because it is food, and food was precious and scarce, I bet paleo dude would have put it in his mouth... and it was good. LOL

Try it, it works. Just don't overdo it or it will turn into nut butter.

Ok, I didn't pull this factoid out of my arse or any other cavity. I did find it online though. I realize that this is not a scintific research paper. perhaps someone else can dig deeper and find something else.

http://www.nutcrackermuseum.com/history_nuts.htm

Never mind, I found the scientific paper. Here it is:

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ar...gi?artid=122386

It doesn't say they made nut flour exactly, but does talk about a basalt rock and other tools used for cracking the nuts. Well that was 750,000 years ago. it wouldn't take much of a leap to grinding it sometime between then and the beginning of the Neolithic era.

Oh right! I had completely forgotten that native Americans ground acorns into a meal and made stuff out of it.

Good find, Jackie!

I added a link to the scientific paper to my post above.

Let me clarify: How would HUNTER GATHERERS get it into flour?