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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.'"
... if we feed animals with cooked food they will start to get intelligent?
Sounds to me like cooking provided an opportunity to grow a bigger brain, but I don't think it explains the need. Something else in the environment made having a bigger brain increase the odds of reproduction, and cooking made it easier to provide the nutrition needed for that brain.
In any case, I don't see how we're "so strange compared to other animals". Seems to me we're remarkably similar, I can't think of any fundamental differences between us and other animals that are more than a matter of degree. Well, I don't know of any animal religions.
how many generations have pigs been slopped from table scraps?
do domesticated pigs have higher IQs than wild boars?
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
The singularity model (some say fantasy, some say theory, call it what you will) is basically that once technology can be used to improve intelligence you get a feedback loop that leads to a society and environment that is literally incomprehensible to the people on the low side of the singularity. This is usually proposed in terms of *designing* brains that are smarter than the ones that designed them, but there's no reason to rule out less fantastic advances as part of the same process.
I think this qualifies as a singularity, from the point of view of the pre-humans.
A much better explanation comes from Dr. Temple Grandin in one of her books: Animals in Translation. She posits that humans and dogs co-evolved, allowing humans to develop their cognitive side at the expense of their sense (smell, hearing).
A lot more convincing argument than cooking, imho.
Actually, this implies just the opposite. Cell membranes (meat) are easy for the body to break down. Cell walls (plants) are quite difficult, and cooking greatly facilitates their digestion. Cooking meat usually somewhat increases its caloric density (by driving water off, making it denser), but *decreases* its total calories (by driving fat off and breaking some proteins down). Cooking plants doesn't increase their calories, but generally makes them more bioavailable. It also lets you eat a more diverse variety of plants; many wild plants are toxic in their uncooked form, and heat denatures the toxins. In many more, heat won't denature the toxins, but repeated boils in changes of water can get rid of them. And, apart from some certain hunter gatherer societies (such as the Innuit), most hunter-gatherer groups get about 80% of their calories from plants.
So, really, it's just the opposite of what you're suggesting.
"Define 'interesting'". "Oh God, oh God, we're all gonna die?"
Only uncooked.
If you fry mushrooms in a little butter or oil, grill them slowly, or simmer them for a little while until they give up their liquids, their taste and texture changes quite a bit.
There's a lot of flavor in mushrooms and there's a lot of umami in them -- basically it enhances the flavors of other things. The texture changes from a slightly dry and chalky one to a 'meatier' denser bite. Grilled portabello mushroom goes well into a bun like a burger, and also makes a fantastic taco filling cut into strips.
Button mushrooms may not be the most flavorful of all of our mushrooms, but, properly prepared there's a lot of taste to be had in button mushrooms. In a curry for example, mushrooms bring a lot of their own flavor as well as soaking up a lot of the other flavors, you just have to know how to cook 'em right.
I usually cook between 2 and 4 lbs of mushrooms per week -- trust me, they're quite tasty. =)
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Ten years ago I helped raise Russian wild boars. They have incredible instincts. We used to joke that the boars had a wiretap inside of our kitchen. In the morning, we'd discuss which boar to kill. We'd get all ready, load the gun, and step outside. The pigs would look up from behind their fence, give a grunt of alarm, and the one we had chosen would run off into the bush. The rest would settle down and continue eating.
Trapping them for transport was also quite challenging. We had a small pen with a portcullis-style drop down gate. You'd drop the gate by pulling on a string. It was easy enough to lure the boars in there with food, but dropping the gate was another matter entirely. Even with ten meters of string, the boar would run out before we got close enough to pull it. We had to resort to seemingly unnecessary measures like 50 meters of string, which would be pulled while out of sight behind a building.
But if we weren't trapping anything that day, we could get as close as we wanted and they'd stay happily eating in the pen. They could also tell when the electric fence was down, and there'd be escapes if the power was out for more than a few hours.
There was (is?) a "raw foodist" restaurant near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. They did things like bake pizza in the sun, which seemed more like serving poorly cooked food rather than raw food. I thought it was a stupid idea, I'm glad to see there's evidence that it is indeed stupid. There are plenty of sound arguments for reducing or eliminating meat consumption, but a strict raw food diet smacks of self-satisfied douche-ism.
....we would never would have such big brains ...
If the size of brains were a measure of intelligence or how much of a given brain is used, elephants should be incredibly smart. Just as there is more to the capability of a computer than its raw hardware, so too, is there more to intelligence than the size of a brain. Just as a computer is a careful combination of software and hardware, so it is also with human intelligence. There is the physical hardware of the brain, but there is also the nonphysical software, the mind. Just as in a computer the hardware and software interact to form the total experience, or if you will, its intelligence, so too it is with people.
Just as the basic software that runs a computer is not utilizing its total hardware all the time, so too, the software of the human mind does not always fully utilize the capability of the hardware of the brain.
The whole purpose of this thing we call education is nothing more than a downloading of (mostly anyway) useful information and programming into what was originally a largely empty information processing hardware we call brain. We still know very little about exactly how much information and programming this cranial hardware can accommodate and exactly how it operates.
All theory is gray
if we ignore all the other palaeoanthropolical evidence, i.e:
1) Bones burned at high temperatures found in caves show that Homo Erectus was regularly cooking food 1.5 million years ago. This is unsurprising because we know they used fire, and and it doesn't take very long for those sitting around a fire to accidentally drop some food in it, fish that food out with a stick, and after eating it, discover that it tastes better than the raw variety.
2) Humans didn't display any technological superiority over H. Erectus, and were technologically inferior to H. Neanderthalenis until around 40,000 years ago. That 40,000 year figure is crucial, because this is the period when we began to produce art, and our tool technology started to incorporate various innovations that H. Erectus and Neanderthal tools didn't have.
3) H. Erectus kept evolving, and eventually developed a brain similar in size to our own (i.e. their brains doubled in size) long before modern humans appeared, while H. Neanderthalensis had a bigger brain than modern humans. It should be noted that H. Erectus is by far the most successful human species, having survived for almost 2 million years (followed by Australopithecus Aforensis, who was around for a million years).
3) H. Neanderthalensis had a more sophisticated culture than ours until 40,000 years ago (again, the 40,000 year break point). They buried their dead, had production lines for tools, and maintained a trading network over long distances while H. Sapiens was spending the first 100,000 years of our existence being primitive aboriginal bushmen in Africa.
The best theory I've seen to explain why humans changed from a very long period in a static, very primitive state is that the climate changes caused by the Indonesian super volcano which led to the "bottleneck event" that nearly destroyed our species favoured the brightest and most innovative people who were able to formulate survival strategies that didn't occur to less imaginative individuals. The ice age which the event caused also wiped out the majority of H. Erectus and H. Neanderthalensis, so those newer, brighter humans were able to expand into new territories without having to compete with significant numbers of other human species who had been technologically, culturally, and physically superior to them before the bottleneck event occurred.
The bottleneck event happened around 60,000 years ago. By the time its effects had completely disappeared, H. Erectus was extinct, H. Neanderthalensis had been depleted to a level they never recovered from completely (they lived in Europe and Asia, both of which were especially badly hit by the after-effects of the super volcano), and the entirety of H. Sapiens was represented by as little as 2,000 individuals living in small, scattered groups whose entire intellectual capacity was dedicated to the difficult business of survival. The fact that it took us another 20,000 years to reach a point where our culture and technology went beyond the levels that other human species had reached hundreds of thousands of years previously is an indication of how difficult the job of merely surviving was during that time, and how close we came to following H. Erectus and H. Neanderthansis into the oblivion of extinction.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Not really. The white mushrooms are the ones you're going to see most often, and since they're cheap, it's what most people will buy.
But, to those of us who cook (and, especially those of us who love mushrooms =) your supermarket will usually have trumpet, crimini, portobello,and shitake in addition to the ubiquitous white ones. Then there's usually several dried varieties which usually travel from someplace else -- like a lobster mushroom, which isn't a specific kind of mushroom, but one which has a fungus growing on it which makes it red and gives it a different flavor.
Go to a Chinese grocer (or a good grocery store) and you'll find even more varieties of dried mushrooms, with much stronger flavors.
For many of us, mushroom just covers the whole spectrum of tasty things out there. Include the whole spectrum of fungus, and you'll get up into things like truffles, which can be some of the most flavorful (and expensive) foodstuffs.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.