Re: not to mention

"theirs is a complete diet, quite variable and seasonal. they could survive, even thrive, until white man came with refined sugar and alcohol and eventually modern processed food. now they have diabetes almost universally, and dental carries, and addictions of all kinds, etc."

It is not just sugar.  In one of the omega 3 books that I have even those Inuits who added sugar and sweets to their diet in the 1970s were still cancer, heart disease and diabetes free.  I believe that grains are one of the most deadly foods in the Western diet (and oh how I love many breads, but simply avoid them).  I gave The No Grain Diet book, by Mercola to my 35 year old granddaughter and when she went on it she lost 10 pounds in less than a week - and she was in no way overweight to begin with.  Her loss was all from around her middle.  You add in the fact that a manufactured sweetener - high fructose corn syrup, invented in the 1970s is added to a wide range of products - particularly soda (because the USA has a high tariff on imported sugar which is half the price of world sugar and lobbied by farm groups - oh my, the grain producers and their subsidies and their lobbies) is probably primarily responsible for the explosion of obesity, diabetes and all the other overweight conditions in the past 20 - 30 years.

You can tout the native/aboriginal diets all you wish (and I do believe they are great) but the fact remains that they didn't survive on their diets by sitting on their butts or picking it up at a drive through.  The gathering of their food required extreme physical activity, another factor missing in our Western living.  The Seven Daughters of Eve by a renowned geneticist is a fantastic review of the lives of our pre-agricultural ancestors.  It is about the seven women who through mitochondrial DNA are known to directly be the mothers of all Western Europeans and it describes their lives in detail.  It was rare that anyone in that era lived beyond age 35 - but it is the life style that we were originally designed for.  

The pre-agricultural people also all had rites of passage.  There were rites for becoming a man or a woman often requiring some form of accomplishment such as killing an animal by spear or bow or spending time alone in nature for a long period of time, after which they were accepted by their community as an adult in a formal ritual.  Marriage ceremonies were more than just wearing nice clothes and kissing, and again acceptance of wedlock by the entire community.  These along with other rites acknowledged milestones of life - something totally lacking in our modern culture, and most likely account for a virtual lack of mental illnesses.  We now raise children who become adults while still in high school, give them little practical value about life and either kick them onto the street or send them to college where they still don't learn anything about how to fact the realities of living in the real world. (I know, I have two college degrees.)