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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.'"
There was this article on the Big Foot myth on TV the other day and a good point was made about how primates with big brains generally live in warm climates because of the energy cost of their brain. The idea is that Big Foot can't live in North America the way that Gorillas live in Africa. There just isn't enough food.
So when humans moved into the colder parts of Europe they would have needed ways to gather enough food to avoid starvation. Perhaps cooking made that easier by broadening their diet.
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Of course they do. You're asking the person to cook all the taste and texture out of a perfectly good cut of meat.
:x
I gather the idea is that the singularity is the point at which the rate of change is so great that it's almost "vertical", and I'm not sure this would look that way even to proto-humans.
If the rate of change is so flat that it's not perceptible over a single lifespan, which is implied by the comment that it took 2 million years to get from the hand axe to cooking, then everything else has happened in 150 millennia. From that point, what's happened in the past 150 centuries might mostly be comprehensible, but what's happened over the past 150 decades would look pretty close to vertical... and the past 150 years is definitely post-singularity for them.
The singularity isn't an event, and there isn't just one event horizon... think about falling into a black hole: once you pass the event horizon you don't stop there, you keep falling, and there's always another event horizon just ahead of you. Technology is like that: it's a process, and from a distant enough viewpoint we are already on the far side of an event horizon.
One tenant of the technological singularity is that we are completely unequipped to predict what the other side will look like. Our pre-cooking, small brain energy ancestors would certainly be unequipped to predict today's world.
I like your analogy.
Funny, I don't remember our Innuit ancestors who discovered bronze working, iron, or eventually the scientific revolution. Oh wait. That's right. That was mostly meat-eaters.
Don't be a colossal bonehead, do a little research. The Inuit live in the Arctic, and traditionalists can survive on the ice, making things out of bones and gut and skin and snow and eating mammals and fish. They're at just about the pinnacle of paleolithic tech, and I'd like to see any of your grain-munchin' bath-averse bronze-waving ancestors last a season up there.
Damn those pesky terrorists