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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)
... if we feed animals with cooked food they will start to get intelligent?
still no explanation for Steak-umms
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
then America would be choke full of obese geniuses.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
I'm betting there's a giant black monolith involved ... (cue Richard Strauss music)
There, fixed that for you.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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
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.
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.
There is animal language, art, culture, and economics. Animals aren't self-analytical, but they are minimally creative and have abstract communication.
Primates and parrots have been taught vocabularies equivalent to preschoolers. They recognize abstractions such as number and color. They not only make tools, but different populations make different kinds of tools. They pass this knowledge on to their offspring, indicating the existence of culture. Some animals have rudimentary economics and can recognize fair and unfair trades. And even birds create art, though if you are speaking of representational art, the list is much smaller.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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
On animal language, I think the jury's still out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_language
Art? Depends on your definition. Whale songs aren't understood, dolphins (and other animals) certainly seem to play and generally "do stuff" just for the hell of it. We have a hard time defining human art these days, I'd reserve judgement on non-humans...
Science? True, I'm not aware of any systematic attempts to understand the world building on the experiences of others. I'm not sure I'd call it a fundamental trait, though. It's certainly important to mankind as we know it, but science in my opinion is enabled by too many more fundamental abilities of the human mind to be considered fundamental itself.
Law? There are certainly hierarchies and rules in animal societies. Nothing written down, and no trials as far as I know. Morals, concepts of right and wrong? Hard to say. That requires empathy, primates might exhibit something like a sense of moral.
Culture? What do you mean by culture? I addressed the art part of culture above, that leaves customs specific to a society of animals. I don't think you can just plain say there are no different cultures in animal societies.
No literature? True, no argument.I Don't think it's fundamental in the sense I meant, though. It's a function enabled by a higher degree of intelligence.
Economics... Well, hard to say again. Economics as the systematic study of transactions and their effects on society? No, you won't find that. Understanding of profit versus risk? Certainly on some level that's there. Here's a New Scientist article on macaque monkeys paying for sex: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/sex/mg19726374.100-macaque-monkeys-pay-for-sex.html
As for self-analytical, any being that learns from experience is in a sense self-analytical.
Creative? Every species has at some point learned new tricks. Monkeys use sticks to fish for insects - I don't think that's a trait hard wired into their brain. Once upon a time, a monkey got creative and learned the trick, then probably a portion of the other members of the species were smart enough to learn the trick, having seen it, or maybe only that one monkey was clever enough, but by learning a good new trick, gained a clear reproductive edge over the others, and some of it's offspring were sufficiently smart to either learn the trick by seeing it performed, or by figuring it out themselves. And so on. In any case, at some point, a monkey got creative.
Abstract communication? Maybe, frankly I'm not fully sure what you even mean by that. My point is, people have historically been very keen on making these blanket statements on just how we fundamentally are different from the rest of the animals (or, often, "the animals"), and the claims tend to not hold up to scrutiny. The human mind is a remarkably complex thing, but it is born of the nervous system, which is a product of evolution. It's tempting to think of some kind of magic point of complexity or whatever you wish to think creates consciousness where a mind turns from animal to human, but I don't think we'll find one. Consciousness is not something you either have or don't, there are degrees. Sometimes we're not conscious of our actions, like when driving a car down a long, straight road. It's not inconceivable that a being could be more conscious than a human being, so I don't think it's inconceivable that a being could be less so, and still be conscious. It's a matter of degree.
Something else in the environment? How about *everything* else in the environment. Or, more simply, the environment itself.
This is 150,000 years ago. These people had no electricity, no medicine, no civilization... basically, they had nothing. Average life expectancy was something around 30 years, if that. Break a leg, you're dead. Get the flu, good chance you're dead. Run into a saber tooth tiger, you're definitely dead. At this point of history that they're talking about, humans were *not* at the top of the food chain, there was no civilization where a person could seek shelter, there were no medications, diet was iffy. And there were plenty of nasty animals running around ready to eat a person!
Something else in the environment? I don't think you appreciate just how difficult it is to live off the land and survive out in the wilderness. Particularly when you're not at the top of the food chain.
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).
Fire. Is there ANYTHING it can't do?
Stop your liver being pecked out each day by a giant Eagle, apparently.....
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
There's no flavor left when it's well done.
Meat should only be cooked enough to be safe to eat. Anything more than that is just burning the flavor and texture of the meat away.
For a steak from an FDA-approved source, that means red or possibly pink in the middle. For ground beef from an FDA-approved source, pink in the middle (because the grinding process mixes the outside surface into the middle of the beef, so it needs to be cooked more). If you personally trust the source of the meat (was the animal healthy) and the slaughterhouse to have kept the meat uncontaminated, there's no need to cook meat at all (steak tartar).
Meat does not require cooking to be 100% digestible by the human gut. Nor do fruiting plants where the fruit is a deliberate part of the seed-propagation strategy (most of what's called fruits and berries). Cooking may still be useful to minimize the risk of biological contamination. On the other hand, most starchy vegetables (tubers, grains, pulses) have more bioavailable calories after cooking. Like 100-1000% more calories.
Further, whenever you consume the actual seed of a plant (grains, pulses, nuts, etc.), you often also have to overcome the defensive toxins that the plant was using to prevent the loss of reproductive potential (they don't propagate if every animal can consume the whole ovary). Drying and cooking are the most effective way, by far, to eliminate and defuse the risks of those chemicals.
Sometimes, like with soy (phytates and phytoestrogens/isoflavones), cooking isn't good enough, and you need fermentation or another process to eliminate the toxins before they're safe to eat. Too bad most soy-food processing doesn't do that, so the defensive toxins end up in most of the processed crap made from soy protein and soy oil on the supermarket shelves. Soy sauce, miso, tempeh, and natto are safe. Most other soy-based foods are not.
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.........
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.
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
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.