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Dear Zooarch, I want to express my most sincere thanks and gratitude for all the Zooarch list members, who have given so helpful and generous assistance by replying to my query. As I have already pointed out, Zooarch is pretty unique in the sense that an atmosphere of friendly cooperation between specialists prevails without any hints of intrigue and petty malice. It was all the more remarkable that busy specialists found the time to give helpful answers to a mere laymanīs question. Many thanks! Kiitos! I have learned so much from the replies. Not in the sense that I would now think that I could talk about the subject with any confidence. No, that would and will demand the effort and time one must invest into reading and understand the references I have been kindly provided by the Zooarch members. But the replies have given me orientation that I simply could not have learned from anywhere else. As the number of replies was beyond my expectations, I shall send my personal thanks for all the list members who provided help to me separately and confine myself here only to one aspect of a (friendly) question Dale asked me immediately: why should an layman would want to follow rather technical exchanges on archaeozoology? Well, I shall give a fuller answer to Dale, but this part of the answer might be of some interest to all the list members. I am sure that many of Zooarch members have read Jared Diamonīs "Guns, Germs and Steel - the Fates of Human Societies". It is a very ambitious attempt to unravel the broad pattern of human history during the last 13.000 years, to explain why history took so different evolutionary courses on different continents. Diamondīs answer has a lot to do with genes, but not with human genes. Rather, he is interested in the changes brought about by the domestication of animals and plants, which for Diamond are the formative influences on later developments. And he has continued (with Peter Bellwood) to explore these issues in trying to explain the spread of different language families etc. Whether Diamond is right is another matter, but the account is fascinating and surely merits detailed further discussion. Now, who would be more well-placed to discuss such questions than people who are specialists in this field, archaeozoologists and archaeobotanists? Best regards, Juha Savolainen Helsinki