How do you know they preferred variety? What's so important about variety and why would paleo people even want variety?
They ate smaller animals because they had already wiped out the mega fauna or mega fauna had become scarce. The cave paintings DO depict larger animals not small ones.
I think because you like variety you have found evidence to support this?
Not at all, I was simply describing the current view of palaeoanthropologists. Indeed, it was the other way round. At the time, I'd given up on the Primal Diet and started looking around for any scientific evidence from palaeo times, and palaeoanthroplogists were all in agreement that paleo cavemen ate diets very rich in variety, so that's what I decided to do - after all, I'd found out, by then, that every single palaeo practice I'd adopted, such as giving up dairy, going raw(hearkening back to palaeo times pre-250,000 years ago) etc. were all solving my past health-problems.Given that I don't seem to do well for various reasons on monotonous diets for various reasons(found via experimentation etc.), I reckon that, for me at least, variety is necessary.
Re studies:- There was that 1 study which claimed that the reason why the Neanderthals became extinct was because they depended mostly on meats from large mammals like mammoths, and that the Neanderthals died out when the mammoths etc. died out due to famine( I showed it on rawpaleodiet yahoo group ages ago), but recent evidence from palaeo times shows that their diet was far more varied than thought. As regards cave-paintings, people tend to forget that they are only from the period of c.20,000 to 30,000 BC, just before the end of the Palaeolithic era, and some 10,000 years after most of the larger mammals like mammoths were largely wiped out(which happened more like 40,000 years BC). So they may not be representational(at least are mammoths depicted? I'd thought only aurochs and horses wre really depicted?).
As regards variety, that's simple logic and backed by scientific reports(the cro-magnon have been shown to have eaten a wide variety of fish, fowl and land-mammals, large or small - of course, humans in different regions, according to reports, ate widely different animals, some small, some large, depending on availability(the cave-paintings referred to, only apply to western europe, given their locality). And, as regards the logic, humans did not have the luxury of having direct access to grassfed meat farms like we do, so would have been forced to take whatever they could get from the environment.