Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Did Cooking Made Us Human?

This metamorphose amazes me time and time again. You take soemthing mother nature gave you...



...and simply by cooking, it turns into something with a different flavour, taste and texture.



But when did mankind came up with the idea of cooking? I searched the lovely net for an answer and couldn't find any useful. Researchers' opinions range from 2.3 million to 10'000 years ago. Wtf.

However while searching, I came across Richard Wrangham, who wrote a book called How Cooking Made Us Human, in which he claims that cooking of food made digestion easier allowing the early cooks to evolve smaller guts and larger brains. Or in other words, modern humans are highly evolved for eating cooked food and cannot live healthily for long on a strict raw food diet (read more about).

9 comments:

Pilgrim said...

Urs, the neandethal peepz found that raw meat wsa more yummy, when fried, only they lacked salt(and all the spices we know today) :-) Propz Pilgrim

Ms Mac said...

I'll bet that book made the new "raw foodies" a bit upset.

Mickle in NZ said...

Eating meat, i.e. animal flesh, helped too because it gave us such a quick protein boost, the brain could develop more as energy not wasted on processing al that fiberous plant matter.

You can tell I'm not a vegetarian - right?

Mickle in NZ said...

Balconey harvest time, right?. The thin chillis look potent!!

MartininBroda said...

Wir sind also "kochende Affen", warum nicht, ich habe übrigens von fanatischen Veganern (gibt es übrigens andere) schon die lustigsten Argumente gehört, warum unser Körper tierisches Eiweiß gar nicht aufnehmen könne. Noch vielen Dank für den weiterführenden Tip zu Lehrer.

Mr. Urs said...

@Mickle... they are from my brother's green house. They ones on the balcony don't behave that nicely.

@Martin... Deine Begeisterung dafür, ein "kochender Affe" zu sein, hält sich irgendwie in Grenzen.

Gauss Jordan said...

Pick up "History of the World" by J.M. Roberts. He addresses this very question in chapter one. ;-)

Mr. Urs said...

@Gauss Jordan... Oh, I only read "A History of the World in 10½ Chapters" by Julian Barnes. That seem not to have been enough. I'll see what Mr. Roberts has to say.

Dr Mandragora said...

I know that I've read before that cooking gave mankind a greater range of foods that he could eat and made it easier to digest.

I've never read anything about a smaller stomach resulting or a smaller stomach allowing for a larger brain. We'll have to check on that.