Did hunter-gatherer humans (those eating diets that are pre
cultivation/domestication)eat the intestines and/or the intestinal
contents of their animal prey, and if so, what parts did they eat
(e.g. rumen, caecum, colon).

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Clarification of Question by 3648075-ga on 11 May 2005 14:13 PDT

The question should be narrowed to whether hunter-gatherer humans ate
the CONTENTS of the animal intestines, and if so, what part.

Well, this was tougher than I thought.  I think there's very little
doubt that most primitive hunting peoples did indeed eat intestines,
since they do so to this day -- that's what chitlins are.

"When game or livestock was killed, the entire animal was used. Aside
from the meat, it was not uncommon for settlers to eat organ meats
such as liver, brains and intestines. This tradition remains today in
hallmark dishes like chitterlings (pronounced chit?lins) which are
fried large intestines of hogs, livermush (a common dish in the
Carolinas made from hog liver), and pork brains and eggs."
From http://encyclopedia.lockergnome.com/s/b/Southern_US_cuisine

Native Americans were known to eat bison intestines as well:
"All the insides, such as heart, kidneys and liver, were prepared and
eaten, roasted or baked or laid out in the sun to dry. The lungs were
not cooked, just sliced and hung up to dry. Intestines were also
dried. Sapotsis or Crow gut is a Blackfoot delicacy made from the main
intestine which is stuffed with meat and roasted over coals. Tripe was
prepared and eaten raw or boiled or roasted. The brains were eaten
raw. If the animal was a female, they would prepare the teats or
udders by boiling or barbecuing?these were never eaten raw. If the
animal carried an unborn young, this was fed to the older people
because it was so tender. The guts of the unborn would be taken out
and braided, then boiled too."
From http://www.westonaprice.org/traditional_diets/native_americans.html

But what *part* of the intestines they ate -- that I was unable to find.
Hope this was helpful anyway!

The clarification asks if they ate the CONTENTS of the intestines.
Hmm?  Doesn't sound attractive, but lots and lots of people these days
don't eat innards  - organs -  and others in other societies do (no
details.  The stories I've heard don't appeal to me either.).
Maybe reports about natives in South America or New Guinea or other
"stone age" socieies could tell us.
Of course, as Hagan-ga mentions, the intestines themselves are eaten:
alone as chitterling, as sausage casing, Scottish haggis and the like
in other countries.

A very good question.  Maybe the idea of sausages came from eating the
"contents".  E.g., coarse liverwurt, a mixture of liver and herbs ...
(Don't know if my German friends will appreciate my asking about this (-: )
Good question.

Okay.  I don't know how much credence to give this, because I got it
secondhand from lewrockwell.com, a fairly fringe political site.  But
it seems to indicate that some Native Americans ate the entire buffalo
gut, contents and all:
"To find out how the cave-man was likely to eat, let?s turn to an
account by John Lame Deer, a full-blooded Sioux born eighty years ago
on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. 'We always had plenty of
food for everybody, squaw bread, beef, the kind of dried meat we
called papa, and wasna, or pemmican which was meat pounded together
with berries and kidney fat... wasna kept a man going for a whole
day." He fondly remembers gorging himself on fat ducks. As for
vegetables, "in the old days we used to eat the guts of the buffalo,
making a contest of it, two fellows getting hold of a long piece of
intestines from opposite ends, starting chewing towards the middle,
seeing who can get there first; that?s eating. Those buffalo guts,
full of half-fermented, half digested grass and herbs, you didn?t need
any pills and vitamins when you swallowed those.'"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/stemm1.html
quoting from the following book:
Nourishing Traditions
Sally Fallon with Mary Enig, Ph.D.
New Trends Publishing, 2001
xii + 674 pages

I'm posting this as a comment, instead of an answer, because I don't
think it's sufficiently definitive (being a single quoted account
repeated in a book repeated in a book review) for you to pay for.  If
I find something more concrete, I'll see about posting an answer.