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Cancer and heart disease are diseases of longevity. Why expect paleo to help with them when there's every reason to believe longevity wasn't a part of that environment?
I don't have data at hand, but I think that's true only partially. Yes, the prevalence of cancer and CVD is a function of the age of the population, but as far as I remember, even after you control for age, they still show up as diseases of civilization with the "primitive" societies having considerably lesser age-adjusted rates.
At least one causal pathway for that is visible: diabetes and the metabolic syndrome in general are clearly diseases of civilization and they are strong risk factors for CVD (I don't know about cancer).