Re: Extinction

[art@acc.com (Art Berggreen)]

>
>        A friend of mine who was on some (I've forgotten) Pacific island
>relayed to me an anecdote about how the natives eat cycad seeds.  Cycad
>seeds are, apparently, highly poisonous if just eaten right off the plant,
>but are quite common in this region and are a staple food item.  To
>eliminate the poisons, the seeds are soaked repeatedly in bowls of water,
>for several weeks, to leech the poisons out.  Apparently, they're toxic
>enough that they just leave the bowls out in the open:  even insects won't
>come near them!  I don't know what kind of mortality rate such a practice
>has, though.

We're drifiting quite a ways from dinos...

Many staple foods used by primitave peoples need processing to make them
palatable.  Around here, the Chumash Native "Indians", used acorn meal as
one of their main staples.  They had to leech high levels of tannic acid
out of the meal, using boiling water, to make it edible.  (I often wonder
"who" first figured such things out)

Art