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Cooking Stimulated Big Leap In Human Cognition
Hugh Pickens writes "For a long time, humans were pretty dumb, doing little but make 'the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years,' says Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai. Then, 150,000 years ago, our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials. We started creating art and maybe even religion. To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, researchers examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism. The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, although definitive claims of causation are premature. In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, thereby freeing up calories for our brains. Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and allocate around 20% of their total energy to the brain, compared to approximately 13% for non-human primates and 2-8% for other vertebrates. While other theories for the brain's cognitive spurt have not been ruled out, the finding sheds light on what made us, as Khaitovich put it, 'so strange compared to other animals.'"
We man got smarts by cooking meats you vegan bitches!!! UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH (think Home Improvement)
still no explanation for Steak-umms
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
I'm betting there's a giant black obelisk involved ... (cue weird music)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
then America would be choke full of obese geniuses.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
If you give them a couple million years to mutate, yes. Provided my step-mother isn't the one who cooks the animals meals of course, in which case they'd devolve faster than you can say "that steak is raw!".
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
People look at me funny when I ask for my steak well done.
Neanderthal dopes!
If we could get all our food preprocessed (already chewed with the waste removed) we could send more resources to the brain and less to the digestive system. We have the technology.
'A couple of generations', what is this, instant-evolution? Close cousine of instant-ramen?
- These characters were randomly selected.
Religion? But I thought you said we got smart.
So are fat people considered over-clockers?
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Something seems out of order here...
1. Sit on duff for 2 million years being too stupid to invent anything
2. ???
3. Invent cooking
4. Get smart enough to invent things, like cooking
5. Profit!
I've heard homeless men coming up with more logical explanations than this.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
They do cook the rice.
Fire. Is there ANYTHING it can't do?
They must. After all, domesticated pigs often co-star on MythBusters and wild boars are almost never on TV shows.
Only if a large stone obelisk moves into the neighborhood at the same time...
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Does that mean I can belittle people for making fun of my obsession with eating other people's cooking?
1) I'm fat.
2) I eat buffets all the time.
3) Buffets contain mostly cooked food.
4) Eating cooked food makes you smarter.
Therefore, I'm smarter than you.
And if that doesn't work, how about this.
I'm kind of smart. I'm also fat from eating cooked foods. If I marry a fat woman that's good at cooking food and we have kids. That kid should be a little smarter than me. Then we can make my kid fat by feeding him/her lots of cooked foods. As long as he/she doesn't marry a twig, my grandchildren will be brilliant!!!
I have just justified my overeating.
Thank you again /.
This post approved by Shampoo.
Of course there was a time when we were completely vegetarian. The diet in the Garden of Eden was fruits and vegetables. It wasn't until after the flood that God gave permission to eat animal flesh. (obviously we don't share the same view of the history of the human race).
Yep, yer darn right that cooking stimulates a big leap in human cognition. I can verify this from personal experience. First they see the pot of boiling water, and they're like, "What the hell?" You can see them start thinking real hard at that point. Of course, they're still not quite certain what's going to happen, but you can tell they're listening hard to what you're saying, and watching what you're doing, trying to figure it out for sure. There's so much cognition going on, you can practically see the sweat popping off of their foreheads. Eventually they really start to believe it, and usually then the cognition drops off due to panic. Beyond that point, they're mostly just shrieking and straining at their bonds and stuff. And of course once you put them in the pot, pretty soon there's no more cognition at all. I haven't RTFA, but I think the slashdot summary is probably a little inaccurate -- should be more like, "prospect of imminent cooking stimulates a big leap in human cognition."
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Then we got really smart....and started fermenting our veggies/grains, and invented BEER!! That way we could drink it!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Thank you for explaining that, Dr. Hubbard... Dianetics is fascinating.
1" thick and well-marbled
Greek seasoning
rubbing... on the top side
half an hour getting them up
Suffice it to say, you don't have to read your post twice to find the subtext.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Why on earth would we have big brains that were dumb? That doesn't make any sense from a survival aspect. Carrying around extra weight and a non-functional large brain?
If this theory is true, then yes, we should suddenly see the rise of cat and dog civilizations. They will probably be so super-intelligent that they will actually enslave another, dumber race of creatures to take care of their daily needs. This will give them ample time to bask in the luxury of doing absolutely nothing at all besides playing, eating, sleeping and toying with their slaves.
As the parent said, though, that could never happen.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Well, if ignorance is bliss, and we got kicked out of the Garden through eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, which is also when we got to eat meat, then I suppose we got smart first, and then we got to eat meat. Now, although this Knowledge damned us to our present planet, I think the chance to eat meat was definitely worth it.
What's this? Another weblog? On transit?
Only on Slashdot would we compare things to a black hole to 'simplify' them.