From what I understand, some proponents of the Paelo diet is that Paleo humans did not eat many starches or dairy products thus cereals grains, legumes, starchy vegetables, fatty meats,salt containing foods and sweets are on the
forbidden list.
However, there is evidence that early man indeed did eat such starches and I can cite sources such as Science and Nature to support my asserations. In my link to 1
Science, the docment indicates that wild grains have been eaten since the Middle Stone age. Though the paper is more concerned with the the endosperm development in the Brachypodium distachyon compared with that of wheat than with with what early humans ate, that right there is evidence that grain has been eaten since eaten since at least the Middle Stone age as evidenced in the introduction of this paper. This plant was eaten as a grain by hunters and gatherers and it's closely related to moderen cereals hence the interest in this plant.
There is evidence that flour has been made for at least 30,000 years according to
Nature. The plants used in these early flours were cattail roots and the grains of the plant Brachypodium or ferns.
Evidience of stone age flour was found in sandstone tools that were likely used for grinding at sites such as Bilancino in central Itaty, Southern Moravia in the Czech Republic and the south of Moscow and these have been dated roughly 30,000k years old.
I have another source from Science Dircet that can back up my assertions. This is a paper that lists starches that were eaten in the Middle Stone age era in the Niassa Rift, Mozambisque in Africa. The writers of this paper thought Africa would be a good place to find the earliest (ScienceDirect quarterly Reseach 70 year 2008 pg 283-300) evidence of worldwide significant reliance on starchy foods.
According to this
paper , legumes were eaten by stone age humans. This paper lists the lithics that were used for residue analysis. BTW,
Lithic analysis is the archeological term for the study of stone age tools.
Table 5 on
page 291 and 2 has an extensitive list of starches residues discovered on these stone age tools.
Of noteworthy interest is the list of nearly 30 members of the
Fabacae family residues found on the stone age tools on
page 292. The plants that belong to the genus
vignia which are part of the Fabacce family includes favacae vigna unguiculata - better known as black eyes peas - and resides of black eyed peas were found on these stone age tools that were found in South Africa. The resides of other members of the genus Vigna found on the are stone age tools unfamilar to us.
Now let us consider members of the Poacae family which is still quite important to modern humans. Memeber of Poacae Pooideae include wheat, oats, and barley though they are not listed in table 5. One of the grains resides listed in table 5
page 291 is still use today. This grain is Sorghum though it's not as widely used as in the past.
Chloris virgata which is listed in table 5 looks like wheat. It isn't wheat though. Most of the grains listed in table 5 are unfamilar to us but they have been eaten since at least the Stone Age.
As for members of the Dioscoreceae family genus Dioscorea - other wise known as yams (not to be confused with sweet potatoes); traces of them were found on the stone ages tools as well. BTW, many of them can not be eaten raw. They must be cooked. It is believed that humanoids have been using
fire for 1.5 milion years. None of the yams listed in table 5 are familar to us with the expecation of dioscorea rupicola which is commonly called wild yam.
However, it is not known exactly how much of the starches stone age humans ate but if if I were to venture a guess, it prolly made up a fair amount of our early diet.
As for meat and starches, early humans had to expand a great deal of energy to hunt down food so I would imagine that high fat meats were favored over lean meat and that it is proable that starches made up a good part of their diet; starches was an is our fuel.
1. I was unable to read the artitce in Sciece but this paper was published in Oxfordjournals as well. The link to the PDF document was provided by Science.