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Cooking May Have Made Us Human
SpaceGhost writes "Anthropologist Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human believes that the discovery of cooked food led to evolutionary changes resulting in a smaller and different digestive system based on a higher-quality diet, mainly relying on cooked meat. In an interview on NPR's Science Friday (text and audio), Professor Wrangham explores concepts such as the digestive costs of food, the benefits (or lack thereof) of raw diets, and a distinct preference in Great Apes for cooked food over raw."
That's why can't understand people who eat almost raw meat (I think it's called "Blue rare")
... or the man just said that primitive humans' diet was predominatly based on cooked meat?
It is utterly improbable.
One hypothesis is that domestication of the modern dog came about partially as a result of our ability to cook food. The dog was a better hunter but we could much more easily access the marrow that the dogs wanted; especially after we cook the meat.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
How would our ancestors been able to cook while cavorting with the dolphins?
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
The initial story pertains to humans and other primates. But mostly humans. We aren't talking about outsmarting other animals, but rather making scientific discovery into evolution, which is inherintly two different things. My argument still stands.
"Chance favors only the prepared mind." -Archimedes
What the author wanted to point out was that we could evolve a more efficient digestive system, when we cooked our food. If someone doesn't have to develop an immune system, then that person has more energy left to hunt, which makes that person more fit for that enviroment, thus we evolve.
Our ability to think and reason is what makes us the fittest. The concept doesn't just apply to physical traits.
... as we aren't the fittest animal out there we simply outthink our enemies which defies survival of the fittest...
Survival of the fittest, not survival of the strongest. Doesn't intelligence make us humans much more fit to our environment? Why would a human need te be able to run 100km/h when you can drive a car?
Evolution is defined as "survival of the fittest."
No, it's not. Wikipedia is closer: "Evolution is change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next."
And fast food made us american!
I'm a vegetarian. Let's say my children will be too, and their children as well (and so on, and so forth). Does this mean that eventually their stomach size will increase?
You mean gasoline prices are now a driving force for human evolution?
Not "fittest" but "most adapted", is the more descriptive term here. And humans are the most adapted creatures on this planet. Even the roach is not as adapted, since we can live in the arctics, they cannot.
"fitness", as applied to evolution, has nothing to do with the kind of "fitness" you might acquire by going to the gym; ie, being bigger and stronger.
"Survival of the fittest", (a phrase that did not originate with C. Darwin), means leaving more offspring who, in turn, leave surviving offspring, passing on whatever adaptive advantage led to having more offspring. Certainly our intelligence, tool using, and general intellectual flexibility is highly adaptive. It is, perhaps, our most adaptive trait, along with bipedalism.
fittest is technically speaking physical fitness. and in evolution survival of the fittest does not apply to intellect, as in other species the most intelligent one usually lose (why there are no talking lions (lol).
You're not up on your evolutionary theory. "Fittest", in the Darwinian sense, means being the best fitted for the environment, not best of breed or anything like that. Psuedo-scientists of the neo-Darwinian stripe love equating "fittest" with "best," which Darwin himself held as not being the case.
Also, you misread the argument in TFA. Simplifying, the supposition made is that the introduction of prepared food into our ancestor's toolkit lessened the need for expending effort spent on processing and digesting it and increased the quality. That enabled selection for greater brain capacity along with smaller gut, teeth and mandibles... Lather, rinse, repeat, add a few other pressures and feedback and you go from an upright chimp to something that would pass unnoticed in Walmart.
As for adapting to your surroundings... Who said that it can't be done the other way around? Logic isn't solely one way.
in human evolution survival of the fittest hardly applies, as we aren't the fittest animal out there we simply outthink our enemies which defies survival of the fittest...
as the stronger lose when in equal numbers, against a intellectual superior.
That's the Conservative political definition of "Survival of the Fittest". Dog-eat-DogItsaJungleOutThere. A blatant perversion of Darwin's statement. If brute force and nastiness were all that defined "fitness", butterflies would drip acid and bunny rabbits would be armour-plated killing machines with razor claws and 6-inch fangs.
Sometimes being cute and fluffy has more survival value (fitness) for a species. Or colourful. Or being able to think. In fact, you name a trait, something out there has probably come up with a way to exploit it for survival value.
That's what I hate about ideological thinking. A hammer mentality in a world with screws, carriage bolts, quick-release fasteners, hot glue, velcro, and, occasionally a nail.
Is this another slashvertisement to get the story out there and advertise the book again? I already listened to the Science Friday segment a month ago.
From the linked article:
[quote]August 28, 2009[/quote]
It may well be an interesting book, but I don't think I will ever get around to buying or reading it, too much of a backlog as it is.
Complete rubbish. Intelligence has many uses and survival may very well depend on intelligence, memory etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition
Compare this article with the one posted back in August 2008:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/08/08/12/2036254/Cooking-Stimulated-Big-Leap-In-Human-Cognition
Opinions?
--Paul
Evolution is defined as "survival of the fittest."
I'm not sure I've ever heard it defined as such, because the statement is almost redundant (in this context, "fittest" means "best adapted to survive") and it misses other key aspects of evolution such as genetic drift and mutation.
In itself, cooked food doesn't constitute evolution but if it changes the selective pressures on a species it can lead do evolutionary differences over several generations.
Why can't cooking be considered an adaption to the surroundings?
Cooking may not have made us human, but it certainly makes us crispy.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Fire determined to be most important discovery of human history!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
If Cooking May Have Made Us Human, those that make me an animal ?
"Survival of the fittest" means that those survive that are best adopted to their environment, it has nothing to do with fitness, strength or any other property, as properties that might be beneficial in one environment might be useless or even deadly in another.
May you?
... cooking our food has not only changed our bodies over the years, giving us smaller mouths ... it's given us an evolutionary advantage: bigger brains
Can we imply the inverse: people with big mouths have small brains and prefer sushi?
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Or use thereof. I've always wondered how - according to DNA analysis - humanity may have gone thru the eye of a needle, with only a small population at a particular point in time. Now, imagine that a group of ancestors lived near a volcano, or a region like you have in Yellowstone. The could cook their food there, in hot pockets (it is still being done). That would allow a group to stay in a single place for quite some time, interbreed, and thrive.
Mastering fire could come much later.
Bert
the original use of the phrase, was applied to physical properties not intellectual.
Cooking Each Other May Have Made Us Human...
I had a sig, but
Actually, fitness has a very specific meaning when discussing evolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_(biology) and is similarly applied to genetic algorithms where it's quantified for sorting and culling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_(genetic_algorithm) In both cases, fitness is context, and therefore environment, specific. -Hope
The best fitted for the environment, in terms of evolution, is the one that survives to pass it's traits along - through breeding. So in that sense yes, it does mean leaving more offspring to pass on whatever adaptive advantage it had gained. I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean we can select for greater brain capacity just by being bored from less effort required for our daily chores. Unless that boredom leads to more time and resources to devote to successful breeding, of course.
And that kids is how I met your mother.
You start out with any of the following: omnivore, herbivore, or carnivore, that is a 'proto-sapeient". Something with an IQ about halfway between a chimp and a human.
They are just smart enough to start using fire and other tools significantly (chimps use them rarely, humans use them 100% of the time.)
The FIRST thing you use your tools for is to replace your natural digestive track. Knives and hammers replace your teeth and mechanical digestion. Fire replaces the stomach acid.
BOOM, now you can eat things that you couldn't before. Herbivore and carnivores instantly become omnivores. Sorry Mr. Niven but you can't have your herbivore puppetters without genetic engineering them. If they fire and spears, they will start to hunt before they starve when a drought/famine/overpopulation reduces the food supply.
Those that do this flourish and your natural inherent digestive track evolves to meet your new food requirements - cooking omnivore. It loses the specialty things like long, sharp, deadly teeth, and becomes capable of eating everything from rice that has been boiled (because we can't eat it without boiling), to fugi fish (poisonous fish that has had the poison gland removed.)
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
http://science.slashdot.org/story/08/08/12/2036254/Cooking-Stimulated-Big-Leap-In-Human-Cognition But I would have sworn it was our oppositional thumbs that did the trick.
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
What about plankton? Remember around 70% of Earth's surface is water.
No ascii art.
Expanding on what you said, natural selection is the survival of the fittest. Evolution in nature happens due to natural selection.
No ascii art.
I think he's suggesting that coconuts migrate.
Sig: I don't spell check and this is legit. This was written while I was drunk, and quite possibly with m eyes closed, b
Survival of the fittest, not survival of the strongest.
Doesn't intelligence make us humans much more fit to our environment? Why would a human need te be able to run 100km/h when you can drive a car?
Not to detract from your point, but no, IMHO intelligence doesn't make us humans more fit to our environment. It merely enables us to shape our environment so that it fits us better. The end result is the same, but our (presumed ;) intelligence is only indirectly beneficial.
That's one reason. The fitness of an individual is very important, but it's not the only issue. Consider the female that is better at nurturing her young than her own mother was. It's a trait that won't benefit that female directly, but will get passed down from her. Also consider sexual selection (check out that tusk.. rawr).
It's really not the ability to be the fittest to survive. It's whatever has the best ability to create successful (non-sterile) offspring. My argument would then also be that two generations are required to test a trait.
Sig: I don't spell check and this is legit. This was written while I was drunk, and quite possibly with m eyes closed, b
I disagree with the article, and would have replied there, but your posting seemed like a good location to reply. All food comes with enzymes that promote the breakdown of itself, and all digestive systems can allow for the enzymes in the food to do the work. Cook the food and you kill the enzymes. And when you kill the enzymes, the body has to redirect resources to the production of enzymes for breaking down food. There are several notable works available that provide empirical evidence to support this notion:
Enzyme Nutrition, by Dr. Edward Howell,
The Wheatgrass Book
The Pottenger Experiments.
The use of fire by humans is relatively recent in evolutionary time scales. And based on the evidence above, I doubt that cooking food did very much to advance the evolution of our digestive system, or our intelligence. And as to the immune system, I don't have enough information to form an opinion other than to say if the body is redirecting resources to create enzymes to digest food, then the immune system could be disadvantaged to the extent that resources are redirected to the production of digestive enzymes.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Because I heard exactly the same thing on TV report more than 5 years ago !
Yes one aspect why many feel that Giant Pandas are doomed in the wild. They mainly have the digestive tract of a carnivore but eat mainly bamboo. Because of this efficiency they must consume some 20 - 30 lbs (9-14 kg) of bamboo a day. They also have to eat at least 2 different kinds of bamboo to get enough protein. That combined with a shrinking habitat (and food supply) and low birth rate doesn't bode well for them.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
So if intelligence is related to nutrition, why aren't cows (the fat blobs!) the most intelligent species on earth?
The book was "How to serve humans"... they had to make apes evolve to get that critical piece of the recipe.
The article: "leading to larger brains and more free time."
A larger brain is not the key to man's intelligence. Some Neanderthals had larger brains than we. Derek Bickerton lays to rest the idea that "larger brains" make us human. See any of his academic books for details.
As for more free time, if that made us any brighter then /. would be crock full of blinkin' geniuses.
I heard this on the history channel 2 years ago. YA YA YA, The energy put in by cooking on the food meant the digestion system need less to absorb nutrients. Thus, the brain had more nutrients to grow because less was spent on digestion. Slashdot needs to get on the ball or maybe they spend too much energy on digestion.
Bullshit. Intelligence comes with a cost. It consumes significant amounts of energy and needs a good cooling. These draw backs can easily outweight the benefits.
In fact the only benefit of intellect is that you can adopt to unknown or changing environment. You don't need intellect to hunt in groups, wolves and lions do this too. You don't need intellect to crack nuts, there are lots of mamals and birds capable of that. But you need intellect to start hunting in groups when your favorite nut goes extinct due to climate change.
In evolution, fitness has nothing to do with it. It's all about surviving long enough to pass on your genes to the next generation. There are several aspects of intelligence that help in survival. There's communication, and spatial awareness, but there's also problem solving. Any one of those things could have been the spark that allowed an ancient group of apes to survive, and the mutation that allowed them to be more spatially aware than before might have gotten bigger and bigger, until you get something like a human being.
I'm curious about your statement "as in other species the most intelligent one usually lose". What makes you say that? Intelligence is an adaptation that's able to survive environmental changes, which is a much bigger advantage over flight, or speed, or camouflage, or strong jaws.
Learn something new.
One hypothesis is that domestication of the modern dog came about partially as a result of our ability to cook food.
Another recent hypothesis is that dogs were domesticated for food. If you look at the genetic diversity of dogs, it is highest in southern China where dogs are still eaten. Archaeological evidence also suggests that the oldest dog bones in the area were butchered.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
And yet, we try to "save" the pandas...has anyone considered that maybe this creature is supposed to die out?
Yes, but "plankton" is not a species. The term "plankton" covers a vast range of organisms -- including both plants and animals, even!
Is there any single plankton species that can be found everywhere from the arctic to the equator? I honestly don't know, but I rather suspect that there will be considerable regional variation.
"Yes one aspect why many feel that Giant Pandas are doomed in the wild."
In the end all K-strategists are doomed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory). They make the best efficience of a given niche but once the niche changes (and it is not "if" but "when") you are out of the game.
"It's really not the ability to be the fittest to survive."
The problem with the "fitness concept" in evolution is that it is a tautology: what's in the end fitness? Whatever makes your genomic pool to perpetuate at a higher rate than the alternates. How do you show that a given genomic pool is better fitted for a given environment? By showing that it in fact perpetuates at a higher rate than the alternates.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean we can select for greater brain capacity just by being bored from less effort required for our daily chores.
No, it doesn't and that's not what I meant. As from TFA, less effort as in utilizing foodstuffs, from chewing to digesting, along with less expenditure of effort in obtaining higher quality foodstuff. That's where the greater brain part comes in, alongside the tool use that made that heady lifestyle change possible. FTA added the argument that gut and dentition proportions became smaller along with changes in digestion, adding its bit into the feedback mechanism that promoted Our Grand Trip from Rock to Heavy Metal.
And you're entirely correct that passing traits along to the next generation is considered the Grand Prize in the game of evolution- which is somewhat sad if you consider the average /. user. By most indications, it's an evolutionary dead end.
As AC says, "Complete rubbish"!
A mere change in coloration can lead to extinction, or dominance in an ecological niche. How exactly, did you arrive at the conclusion that the most intelligent of other species usually dies? Citations, please, or you're talking out your ass.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"fitness" != "physical prowess". In Darwin's usage, it's meant in its proper broader sense, and applies to things as diverse as plumage color, instinctive cooperative behaviors, and yes, even having a more sphisticated brain that allows you to out-think your prey.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
...it must have happened shortly after the monolith appeared :-)
Need an ISP in South Africa?
Your ideas about evolution are fairly dated. It lacks our new understanding that there are other things that "want" to replicate besides genes. We know are starting to understand that ideas and culture are a replicant who is on par with genes. We call them memes.
When viewed through the idea that memes "want" to replicate--scientific discoveries and things like cooking become memes routing around meatspace constraints. In otherwords, science is not a hindrance to evolution, it *is* evolution. Just not evolution as defined by our earlier understanding of the word.
Chinese eat everything that walks, crawls, swims, slithers, slouches, and probably more. More about this intriguing development at 10:00
Which segues into an important question about the effects of domesticating animals on the species that is doing the domestication.
There is no question that the domestication process had a major impact on dogs. There has been a kind of taboo on looking at the other side of this, though: what were the effects on the humanoids, how much did our ancestors change due to the new partnership with dogs? Dogs have changed markedly since their ancestors began associating with humans; does it not seem likely that the human side of this partnership must also have undergone significant changes?
In many ways, our social organizations are more like those of wolves than they are like those apes. Even many of our facial expressions are more wolf-like than ape-like: the social smile comes to mind.
But in eurocentric cultures, any research in this area runs into a taboo about challenging the "god gave man dominion over the animals" of the dominant religious teachings. We might have to wait for the antichristian PETA to free us all from these antiquated beliefs before any scientific progress can be made in this area. <disclaimer>Last sentence may contain "irony" and may even be considered a farce to be reckoned by some.</disclaimer>
Will
Hi,
Well, I have to say that there were too many leaps of faith in the piece. As I listened, it became clear to me that the fellow was just plain leaving out a vast portion of the process of cooking that needs major attention. First, it is that when anything is cooked, especially veggies, they loose a great deal of their nutrients and vitamins. I don't care how much more easily these are absorbed, the net result of cooking is not going to be MORE nutrient value. Ease of digestion, yes. Riddance of bacteria, yes. Clearly, the loss of a great deal of nutrients in the cooking process is going to more than erase the gain in absorption rates. This is not to say that I disagree with everything he was speaking to. He just missed the point a tad. I think it much more likely that the balance of types of foods, and the introduction of food storage or preservation was much more likely the root cause. For instance, creatures that planned ahead, or perhaps ?just accidentally? laid up food stores for the dry months or the cold months would have a considerable advantage over ones who merely gathered and ate at any given time.
Next, there is a disconnect in the technology arena. Lets assume that he is right that this happened some 1 to 2 million years ago. Where did these folks do their cooking, and with what kind of cookware? I haven't heard of any pots that could take cooking in the modern sense from that time period. Best case was an animal skin with water in it heated by tossing in rocks from the fire. This kind of cooking is WAY difficult, try it. Mostly only effective for things like herbal remedies or tea. Perhaps some sort of crude baking in rock enclosures within a fire? Very dirty! I know its a long time ago and all, but then again, these sorts of inventions are attributed to somewhere around 10-15k years ago. Clay pots were not able to be used for cooking until the modern era, and even then are very fragile.
Things like breads or tortilla type of foods? Those took industry, like grains gathered, ground, and from the meal some sort of patty made. Cooking these on a hot rock, sure I can believe it. Also, grain seems to store fairly well. This seems to have merit! Most people can't digest raw grain, but how about those guys 1 m. years ago? Go figure. I understand that the way that termites digest wood is through a symbiotic relationship with microbial colonies in their guts. Could we have had different microbes back then that allowed us to digest raw grains or even other plant matter that we can't even imagine eating now?
I don't know of any possible evidence that could support grain processing in that time frame, although I have held some stone tools that are dated to more than 1 m. years ago, but these were blade tools, I haven't seen any grain grinding tools. I would put this in the frame of almost possible, with a few leaps of faith such as massively abundant wild grain plants. Could they have been farmers? It would take a lot of convincing to the contrary modern ideas of archaeology! Don't get me wrong here, I think most archaeologists base their ideas on whim, fancy, or other archaeologists' mistaken ideas.
I'd be willing to believe that meat on a spit was about as far as cooking went 1-2 m. years ago. Now, is it really possible that the cooking and preservation of meats alone could bring about this change? I don't know, but I do find cooking meat over a fire to have primordial significance in my life.
Still, you can make mine sushi with a side of mercury!
While Wikipedia's definition of evolution is better than the original, it still fails to provide an adequate model of reality.
Inheritance includes a lot more than genetics. For the human species, inheritance includes the transmission of culture that occurs over the first 10 to 20 years of life; without that transmission, you don't have a functional member of the species. Any useful evolutionary model needs to take this non-genetic critical inheritance into account. It is clearly the only way to reconcile human technological development, the interaction of the human species with different ecosystems, and evolution.
This model suggests that
Ideas expressed above are fragmentary, incomplete, and possibly off the wall. But maybe they will stimulate some insights along these lines; we definitely could use some further insights into how culture and evolution fit together.
Will
Doesn't intelligence make us humans much more fit to our environment?
I'm not sure which is funnier, your comment or that fact that someone modded you insightful.
The specific kind of intelligence found in modern humans--the kind that writes operas and builds space craft and creates the general theory of relativity--is a problem for evolutionary theory because it has no conceivable use in our ancient habitat, and there is no evidence that it was used for anything very interesting back then compared to the vast capacity that we actually know it has. It's as modern humans had the capacity to fly by flapping their arms, but had only been doing so for the past five or ten thousand years, staying Earthbound for the previous millennia.
Human intelligence has the capacity to do things incredibly well that no other organism has the capacity to do at all, and which have no apparent benefit to stone age hunter-gatherers.
The current best theory, which is accessibly described in the book "The Red Queen" is that human intelligence is a peacock's tail: guys who were able to entertain women with humour, art, cleverness of various kinds were more likely to breed. The offspring of those couplings were more likely to appreciate each other's charms, producing a run-away selection effect of the kind that generates other bizarre and functionally useless features in a wide variety of species that have been subject to a similar process of sexual selection.
In the case of humans, because you can't appreciate intelligence without being intelligent yourself, women were dragged along by the same process as men, explaining why there are such tiny differences in male and female intellectual capabilities that you have to do incredibly precise laboratory measurements to see any distinction at all, and even then people will find reasonable grounds to argue about it.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
"fitness", as applied to evolution, has nothing to do with the kind of "fitness" you might acquire by going to the gym; ie, being bigger and stronger.
... shall we say ... mating potential, and thus a higher chance of producing offspring, than a nocturnal Mom's-basement-cave-dweller. (By the way, I'm not at all accusing you of being the latter, I'm just making an observation. No offense intended!)
Actually it does, for reasons that you stated in your next sentence!
"Survival of the fittest" [...] means leaving more offspring"
I reckon someone who hits the gym regularly (not necessarily daily even) will have more
mainly relying on cooked meat
Shitstorm from the vegetarian/vegan crowd in 3, 2, 1..
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Which leads to the sad conclusion that in today's world, the traits that lead to fitness as described by evolution are to be poor, uneducated and illiterate - and pop out babies like clockwork.
Has anyone conclusively demonstrated we really are smarter than Neanderthals were? I mean clear we had some advantage since we're here today and they aren't but I think you could make a pretty good argument that our advantage was some specific trait, like better language skills which allowed us to work better in groups, rather than overall intelligence.
Please let me know if you know something more about this than I do.
There is no question that the domestication process had a major impact on dogs. There has been a kind of taboo on looking at the other side of this, though: what were the effects on the humanoids, how much did our ancestors change due to the new partnership with dogs? ... any research in this area runs into a taboo about challenging the "god gave man dominion over the animals" of the dominant religious teachings.
Well, perhaps, in the "silly sciences". But among biologists in general, there has been no sign of such a taboo, and this topic is dealt with quite openly. It is well-understood that, as one text I saw recently put it, humans are one of the species with the most symbiotic relationships. We have domesticated several hundred animal species and several thousand plant species. Much of the reason we've been so successful at this is a major human adaptation that is referred to informally as "empathy". We are capable of understanding other species to a much greater degree than they can understand us.
The dog is an interesting case, because it's clear that they differ from their wolf ancestors in that they have a good understanding of human psychology, body language, etc. This is true to a lesser degree in a few other domestic species, notably cats and horses. But most of our domestic animals don't really understand us; we understand them (to varying degrees).
Or course, even with dogs, this takes some learning on our part. I ran across a funny example a few months ago. A writer (whose name I've forgotten) wrote that birds in general are "alien" creatures, with a body language totally unlike ours, and basically incomprehensible to primates like us. My reaction was "What? Is there a problem understanding bird behavior?" But I'd read some of the biological articles on the topic, and (probably more importantly) due to my wife's serious allergies to furry critters, I've lived in a house with birds for several decades. One of them right now is a blue-crowned conure, who was a "rescue" bird. She was found in a tree in a nearby town about 20 years ago, and some people who knew parrots got her to come down for some food. She was nearly starved, and had obviously not been a wild bird. She had a couple of homes for a few years, one of them a friend of ours who had retired, was traveling a lot, and asked if we wanted to give her a home. She has lived with us since.
Now, blue-crowned conures are not in any sense domesticated. It's likely that a very recent ancestor was caught in the wild, and she's the result at most a few generations of breeding (if you can call it that). Her species has no adaptations for living with humans, but she gets along well. And it's obvious that the reason is that we can talk to her in her own language. As the bird books would say, she's now part of a flock that's led by a couple of those funny flightless humans. A year ago, she got outside, and was in a neighbor's tree, totally terrified. We spent an hour "talking" her down to lower and lower branches, until finally she flew to my shoulder and started nibbling my ear. We took her back inside her home, and she shows no interest in that horrible outdoors, except to watch out the window when we're not there, squawking a greeting when we walk up to the house. Just as well; she'd die quickly in the New England winter that's coming, if she didn't starve first. (We also have cockatiels, but they've been domesticated and bred for about 150 years.)
Anyway, this isn't anything at all odd. Around the world, people keep all sorts of "undomesticated" animals as pets. There was a nice example years ago in a National Geographic article that started of talking about an area of India where people express wonder about the Europeans who keep huge "wolves" as pets; aren't they afraid of what those animals will do to their children? The article then went into its topic: In that part of India, people have pet cobras that wander freely around the house. They're not worried about the childre
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
You're right there are a bunch of leaps of faith in his premise but let me address some of your concerns:
Cooked foods, whether meats or vegetables have more calories (energy) although the process may destroy some vitamins. For most of historical and pre-historical time humans have been calorie limited. Vitamin deficiencies are a separate issue and hunter gatherers living on a diverse diet of whatever they could lay their hands on would have had plenty of those with and without cooking.
As for the mechanics of cooking, you've overlooked two simple techniques. Cut off a piece of the animal you just killed, stick it on a sharp stick, and hold it over the fire (think of it as a bloodier alternative to a hot dog). Alternatively you can burry things in the coals of a fire and then dig them out again (we used to do this with potatoes when I went camping as a kid). Both are going to have cooking benefits although they won't taste nearly as good as something cooked over a charcoal fired grill (although you know what they say about hungry being the best spice, and our ancestors were definitely hungry).
You're right grains came much later and producing things like bread or even boiled rice takes more effective cooking technology. Agriculture came much later, you need the good brain first, then you can start altering your environment over months or years to ensure you can keep getting enough food to support that brain.
Man is more likely to have been affected by its domestication of annual plants like wheat. Growing wheat required settling down into stable communities, tending the plants meticulously, harvesting and storing them as a mass collective effort. Can't remember where I read it, but man has been described as a subservient species to plants like wheat which modified themselves to capture a host organisms. At any rate, I think at least that the adage "You are what you eat" does apply in some small way to the evolution of humans.
May the Maths Be with you!
I would think that at best it might make us tender...
OK, succulent if you use the right equipment.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
the original use of the phrase, was applied to physical properties not intellectual.
Regardless of what the original use of the phrase may have been, the use that is relevant to any discussion of evolution is that of Charles Darwin. From Wikipedia:
Darwin first used Spencer's new phrase "survival of the fittest" as a synonym for "natural selection" in the fifth edition of On the Origin of Species, published in 1869. Darwin meant it is a metaphor for "better adapted for immediate, local environment", not the common inference of "in the best physical shape". Hence, it is not a scientific description, and is both incomplete and misleading.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
So... we couldn't be the most physically fit, so we evolved a superiour trait? HAX
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
Oh sure. Teleological thinkers, god-believer-inners...
I reckon someone who hits the gym regularly (not necessarily daily even) will have more ... shall we say ... mating potential
Aha! I knew gyms were just a front for coupling services, a flesh market. Largely based on the observations that people in gyms tend to already be well fit when they start attending.
During the Tong Dynasty, China was definitely a wealthy kingdom in the heart of Asia. Here, "wealthy" is a relative term. Though China of that era is likely poorer than Soviet Russia, China was still the richest nation during the time of the Tong Dynasty.
Now, look at Japanese food. It has simple procedures that require few ingredients. Having few resources, the inhabitants of Japan created cuisine that minimized the use of natural resources. Consider raw fish, which was a common food item in ancient Japan. Raw fish requires little preparation beyond just slicing off the flesh.
Here is an exercise for the reader. The Big Mac is the quintessential item in the American cuisine. What does the Big Mac tell us about American civilization?
This is no joke. Where I live there are more Chihuahua's than babies. People carry them around like their precious children. It's seriously out of control. It's only a matter of time before I start seeing doggy push chairs.
Why are you so convinced that "opera" or "build space craft" intelligence (whatever that is) is somehow fundamentally different from "teach your kid to start a fire" or "design a bow and arrow" intelligence? The more I think about it, the less sense your argument makes.
Hmm. I come from India, in a place where there are plenty of cobra's and they are killed on sight (i.e - even if they are not causing trouble, because the general idea is that if a cobra doesn't cause trouble today, it will tomorrow). India is a vast place, with a multitude of cultures, so it is possible that in some part of India the situation that you describe does exist. When I searched for this on the web, though, I came up with the following on National Geographic TV:
Perhaps you confused Thailand with India. Or perhaps you are right, and there really is a place like you describe in India. All I could find, though, was the above reference.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
On the other side of the coin, is it "run away selection" that makes it possible for guys like Kevin Federline to have multiple offspring with different mothers (some much more successful than he) without an apparent intellectual curiosity? Is it why a woman would rather "hookup" with the smooth talking gas station employee over the shy (but otherwise intelligent and handsome) guy who is more successful?
It's only a matter of time before I start seeing doggy push chairs.
Oh, we've got that already here in Portland. Sometimes it seems like every fifth stroller you see at the mall contains not a child but a lap dog, out shopping with its people. And any bicycle event draws a large number of Totos in bike baskets, panniers, and $500 bike trailers... it is weird.
Will
Or course, even with dogs, this takes some learning on our part. I ran across a funny example a few months ago. A writer (whose name I've forgotten) wrote that birds in general are "alien" creatures, with a body language totally unlike ours, and basically incomprehensible to primates like us. My reaction was "What? Is there a problem understanding bird behavior?"
Perhaps it meant that we can't interpret the body language without getting used to it. If you have never had a dog but meet one you can pretty easily tell it's mood. (Whether it is happy, scared, anxious...) and it's attitude towards you (Friendly, curious, hostile...). However, if you have never owned a parrot you can't interpret it's mood at all aside from "If it sings joyfully, it is probably happy" but that isn't body language.
I am also a parrot owner - have been for several years - and I've studied them, read about them, talked about them and spent many thousands of hours with a parrot. We know each other's body language very well. If he is on a bookself and stares at me I can pretty easily tell "Oh, that posture, that stare, his crest is like that, he moves like that... Yeah. He obviously wants to start flying, fly to my head and take a nap there but is waiting for me to stop still first." and it is very natural to me.
However, my mother hasn't spend that many thousands of hours with the parrot and can't interpret his body language nearly as well. Often I have to tell her "Stop trying to play with him, can't you see he wants to calm down a bit..." because she doesn't see it from his body language.
It goes the other way around too. The parrot doesn't let her scratch his neck when it is itchy. It isn't any relationship issue, he can walk to my mother and bop his head sideways to tell that his neck is itchy but when my mother tries to scratch it, the parrot doesn't let her. It is because the parrot misinterprets some very minor (to us) thing in her body language, such as the angle of the wrist or how her fingers are...
But someone who has never owned a parrot? If he walked to a person and bopped his head sideways, I am 100% sure that 99% of the people would have no clue that it means that his neck itches. In fact, I'm pretty sure they couldn't even tell if he is tired, scared or in a bad mood. In all of those most people would think "He flies around and screams. He probably isn't happy?" and couldn't interpret anything more.
I'll have to look that up; it sounds impressive.
I don't remember where the NG story was in India; I vaguely recall that it was southerly. I also don't know how large an area they were writing about. It is interesting how many different cultures there are in India. It's one of the most culturally diverse part of the planet. Not that people there always get along, but they do seem to be generally more tolerant of differences than people are in much of the rest of the world.
I wonder if I could find the video of the kid playing with the cobras again. It did make me a bit nervous for the kid, but it was interesting that the snakes just tolerated it and didn't much interact with the kid.
I do also remember that the story said that people didn't really interact with the cobras much. It wasn't at all like our cats or dogs. Mostly the cobras slept in their nest during the day, and came out to hunt mice after the people had gone to sleep. But the writing was clear, that the people there weren't afraid of the cobras.
For that matter, when I was young (8 or 9), I had a friend who had a pet tarantula. He carried it around on his shoulder, or sometimes it would be in his shirt pocket. Again, they didn't really interact all that much. But the spider trusted him, and tolerated being touched by the few people who were brave enough.
I also had a friend some years ago with a pet boa constrictor. She worked part time as a belly dancer, actually, and used the snake in her act, but she carried it around with her at other times, too. She described it as a large piece of jewelry. She could drape it around her body any way she liked, and dance, and the snake would just hang on. She liked the way that most adults were nervous about it, but she could walk up to children and have them handling the snake very quickly. She also said that handling snake was basically just a question of getting to understand them. Even poisonous snakes usually won't harm humans unless they think they're in danger, so you just have to learn how to make the snake trust you. Boa constrictors are completely harmless to people, though, until they get very big.
I'd guess that the Thai snake handlers have worked with their snakes for a long time, understand what makes them nervous, and don't do those things. If the snakes trust you, and have some food in their belly, they'll tolerate being handled as just one of the things those crazy humans do to you.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
fittest is technically speaking physical fitness. and in evolution survival of the fittest does not apply to intellect, as in other species the most intelligent one usually lose (why there are no talking lions (lol).
Really? Then how did we become the "fittest" species on the planet when we can't outrun a housecat, much less something bigger that sees us as food?
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
Don't know about you, but I haven't written any operas, or designed any spacecraft lately.
Another recent hypothesis is that dogs were domesticated for food.
That does not make sense, dogs are carnivores and thus compete with humans for food, twice even, first the food which feeds their prey, and then the prey.
Pigs who are omnivores and can't digest cellulose are already problematic, probably why Judaism and Islam forbids eating them.
Keeping and domesticating dogs in such early stages of civilization just to eat them them seems unlikely. Still the variation of dogs in southern China could be from breeding, but at a much later state when it became a luxury good, think Conspicuous Consumption. Which is another explanation for the mentioned pig-taboo: Too many farmers imitated the few wealthy ones that could afford holding pigs, thus resulting in a famine since no one wanted to be the first to give up pig farming. And to stop this race to the bottom (I think that is the game theory name) in the end "God" via a wise prophet commands them to stop this silliness.
I'm going to have to look for that Nat'l Geo article because it sounds like hooey :P
As an owner of snakes, and someone who has friends that keep 'hots' (venomous snakes), that story makes no sense.
Most snakes would prefer to be left alone and won't actively chase you, but cobras and a few other species have been known to actively go after people in their territory. They will also react to sudden movements or scent cues instinctively.
My boa constrictor is a very calm specimen, typical of the breed, but even the slightest hint of rodent scent and she will fling herself across the cage faster than you would expect. This feeding reaction is typical in all the species I've kept. I would not want to take that kind of risk with a snake that can kill you in minutes or hours.
It's a common practice for showmen who use cobras in India to defang them (known as venomoids in herp circles) or to actually sew their mouths shut. The presence of a cobra in itself would likely be a deterrent to mice, so I wouldn't be surprised if they used one of those methods. But it would be insanity to let an intact cobra loose in ones house.
You are considering intelligence to be unique to humans. We do have a unique set of skills — that is a difference of kind, not degree, between us and animals — but animals can also adapt their behavior for unknown and changing environments. Those adaptation skills are part of a large set of skills that we share with animals. With those skills, it is a difference of degree, not kind. And for many of those shared skills, we are on the weaker end compared to various animals.
My point is that intelligence isn't a choice between a) you have it and your brain is expensive or b) you don't and your brain is cheap. Instead, all animals have varying degrees of intelligence or "skill levels" and brains will need energy and cooling in proportion.
But I don't deny that we do have special brains and skills to match. Somewhere along the way, we either accidentally grew a bigger brain which enabled our unique skills, or slowly developed unique skills that need disproportionate brains. More likely both, in an entangled mess.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
They're very docile, and not a threat to life, but you wouldn't want to get bit by a fully grown adult. They can definitely leave a mark :)
I think I found the episode in question. "Hiss of Death".
Now to see if it's on out there as a torrent.
I too remember seeing video of a child playing with cobras, but the cobras were all 'muzzled' with thread through their mouths.
Well, having the animals available kinda allowed us to have plants to harvest. If you have what is basically a wolf that you live with, it's easier to defend a small crop from the people you don't know.
Funny, but yeah, he's got a point. We've got a really awkward body, by any stretch of the imagination. It's not really specialized in doing any one thing very well, like many other animals' bodies. Rather, it's more of a very versatile body, able to do many things decently well, that's limited only by the intelligence inside it.
Yeah, creative problem solving. Just being highly adaptable to the environment is our strongest suit.
Have you just not heard of trichinosis? It's common in Middle East. Swine wallow in mud to stay cool. That's a recipe for humans getting parasites.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I agree that thinking and reasoning has caused us to be more advanced than animals. Being able to cook is one of the many great things that we have been able to adapt with. I do like to bake, and some times I wonder how people came up with the recipes that exist. Some combinations of ingredients don't seem to make sense why they are together, but in the end it tastes good. Yes, our intelligence makes us human, but I think one of the first examples of the human intelligence must have been that of cooking.
But someone who has never owned a parrot? If he walked to a person and bopped his head sideways, I am 100% sure that 99% of the people would have no clue that it means that his neck itches. In fact, I'm pretty sure they couldn't even tell if he is tired, scared or in a bad mood. In all of those most people would think "He flies around and screams. He probably isn't happy?" and couldn't interpret anything more.
Yeah; that was basically what I was saying, though I said it the other way 'round. The writer I was talking about was saying that birds are totally alien to us; I was replying with the biologists' comments about humans having been modified by our domestic critters to have this "empathy" thing that enables us to learn to understand species (animals and plants) that are radically different from us. So, since I've lived with birds for decades, I find them very easy to understand. But I've never lived with horses, so when when my horse-owning friends tell me how communicative they are, I don't see it. I can easily believe it's there, though, from the close coordination you often see between a horse and rider. This fits right in with what the biologists have been saying about us: We aren't born with an instinctive understanding of other creatures, but we (or at least some of us) do have an ability to pick up on other animals' behavior and eventually come to an understanding of what they're communicating.
Another funny anecdote that bird owners can appreciate: While walking with a bunch of co-workers to lunch a couple of years back, one of them made a comment about some birds fighting. I looked where he was looking, and at first didn't see any birds fighting. Then I realized what he was seeing. It was a pair of pigeons, an adult and a juvenile. The juvenile was demanding food from the adult, and the adult was trying to wean the youngster by refusing it the food. To the other guy, it looked like they were fighting. To a person who has watched parent birds raise their babies, it was obvious at a glance what was really going on. That particular behavior isn't much like any human behavior, especially since we don't feed our young by regurgitating food from our crops. But once you've seen it a few times, it's easy to recognize a baby bird saying "Feed me!" while the parent is in effect saying "You're old enough to get your own food, you spoiled brat!"
I'd also agree with that parrot preening invitation. I know exactly the motion you mean, but I expect that it would be meaningless to someone not familiar with parrots. Similarly, I have a friend who has several pet geckos. She likes to tell people how friendly and communicative they are. I can tell that they really like her and they interact a lot, but I don't see the communication. I suppose after a few months around one, I'd start to pick up on their language.
But this has wandered a distance off the topic of why we cook our food. It has led to a few funny scenes in our house. I have several photos of our male cockatiel reaching across a plate to grab chunks of a steak. So much for them being strictly seed eaters. I have this mental image of a flock of several hundred cockatiels descending on a cow and tearing it to pieces. But I suppose not; it would be too tough for them unless it's cooked. The little guy also loves cheeseburgers, especially the cheese and meat, though he likes blood-and-fat-soaked bread, too. I doubt if his wild ancestors ever had such a diet.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Dogs aren't carnivores. They're omnivores, just like we are, and their digestive system is very similar due to "shared evolution". There's a reason why dogs will get sick if they eat nothing but raw meat; likewise, they'll get sick if they eat only raw foods (like, oh, carrots) they will get ill (and often turn on their owners, if they're large enough)?
Have you ever seen a dog eat grass, bugs, or cooked vegetable/grain table scraps? That's partially because their dietary needs are very similar to our's.
Dogs are foragers. They'll eat most anything, but prefer meat and cooked foods - just like we do. some wild dogs are somewhat similar, in that they prefer meat which is at least partially decayed so it is easier to digest.
It's likely that dogs in early China weren't kept like pigs or chickens might be. They were probably "kept" in much the same way that cats are kept on farms in much of the world: for pest control. The dogs would eat the rats and mice, keeping their populations in check, as well as helping keep predators away from the chickens.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
This is kind of a tangent to some of the ideas you bring up. This past summer, I visited a "zoo" in the large jungle town Iquitos, in Peru. They had sloths, anacondas, capybaras, and caiman in cages. However, running freely around the "zoo" were 3-4 species of monkeys, with "Pepe", the big guy, the size of a two year old, several malnourished dogs, a coati, and two macaws with their flight feathers clipped. They all clustered around the people, fighting over bits of food, getting scratched and petted, and generally getting along and not eating each other. I suspect if they didn't have people feeding them all the time, there would be more violence and eating between them, but it kind of indicated to me that tolerance and closeness is not something foreign to the animal kingdom -- perhaps just a situation brought about by hunger.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The grandparent had it correct -- it was India. There was a documentary about a village in TN which showed cobras living with people. Yes, cobras are killed usually, but living with cobras, feeding and worshiping them has always been a part of life in several places across India.
I have long felt that barring lab settings, most humans in practice are unable to measure the calories they take in.
I linked to the transcript of this radio show in my article Better weight management through science , which many slashdotters might find interesting.
Does this make anyone think of To Serve Man.
Have gnu, will travel.
That is an interesting idea. I know this is unlikely, but can they tell anything about the age of the dogs that were butchered for food. It would seem sensible that they were domesticated to help hunt food until they were old enough to no longer do, at which point they became food.
This idea would be repulsive to modern day Western Society.....killing and eating your old hunting buddy rover when he couldn't run as well anymore....but it does seem like the type of pragmatic behavior that helped early man survive.
Disclaimer: I'm vegetarian.
No wit here.
The breakthrough came when they learned to cook the dog.
oh oh - wait until the crazy creationists hear about this
Of course, in the meantime, many humans have replaced cooked food with fast food. And there goes what makes us human -- hand in hand with our fitness (both evolutionary and health-wise).
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
how much did our ancestors change due to the new partnership with dogs?
There was an article in Scientific American a few years back (maybe more I've been subscribing for some time now) that discussed that question specifically. Indeed that article (I'll try to dig up the citation later) really suggested that humans and dogs had a very symbiotic relationship; they somewhat domesticated each other. At some point the pre-domesticated dogs learned they could get food from the humans. Subsequently the humans recognized the dogs as both useful hunting partners as well as companions. The humans fed the dogs, the dogs helped get the food. This helped the humans get more steady supplies of meat and the dogs a more steady supply of marrow. You could say that each species improved life for the other.
One could make an argument that having the dogs as hunting partners then gave the humans an opportunity to spend more time on tool making, which subsequently improved their hunting and cooking skills. However the dogs still had numerous advantages over several hunting tools so it remained advantageous to keep the relationship going. At some point after, the humans learned how to breed the dogs for the traits they were most interested in which started us on the path to the domestic dogs we have today.
Furthermore, many of the earliest recognized grave sites with human remains often contain canine remains as well, indicating just how far back the dog-human relationship goes and how much it meant to earlier humans.
I don't know of many evolutionary biologists who would consider that a taboo topic to discuss.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Another hypothesis is that dogs actually domesticated *us*. Okay well, it's actually less a "hypothesis" than an old Twilight Zone episode, but it's a cool twist ending nonetheless.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I don't know of many evolutionary biologists who would consider that a taboo topic to discuss.
I don't know of any evolutionary biologists. I am pleased to learn that they are discussing this and exploring it within their field of interest.
It would be good if this concept of symbiotic relationship between man and dog were brought into other fields as well. It could only help in the work that is being done with therapy dogs and service dogs. There are broader concerns as well: it could be we need to recognize that contact with dogs is necessary for sound psychological development and emotional health.
So basically, how deep does the symbiosis go? Is a human child dependent on some degree of contact with dogs for healthy growth? These are not questions for evolutionary biologists. These are questions that evolutionary biologists should be offering to psychologists as worthy of study.
C'mon guys. A little cross-pollination would help the whole garden bloom.
Will
*Sigh*
Why is it that certain writers always try to pin down "the one thing that made us human"? Yes, cooking food was one of the important steps towards what we are now in that it made a far wider range of foods available to us, but there are so many other things that have furthered that process - pointing to just one of them simply skews the picture. Using fire was important, but so was walking on our feet, learning to talk, using tools and so on. Personally, the one thing that I find most "human" is our ability to empathise with other species than our own.
But we should not forget that all the things that set us apart do so only by degrees; we can use more tools than any other animal, we can communicate more than others, we are more intelligent - but none of our traits are unique.
The Chinese may have kept them for other reasons and eaten them as needed, much like native Americans. There is a hypothesis that dogs were domesticated shortly after civilization created garbage dumps. The idea goes that with fixed settlements came fixed garbage dumps, which drew in wild animals much like today. Evolution favored those animals less afraid of man, because they were the first ones to scavenge freshly dumped leftovers, and eventually relatively tame wolves were domesticated.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
[sigh] I've been reading /. for a long time, yet I'm still surprised that this got modded Insightful.
Are you saying that for humans physical traits are evolutionarily irrelevant, or in general they aren't?
Our mental abilities are clearly important, possibly the most important differentiator from other species (from a survival perspective). But I think it's obvious that some physical traits have survival benefits, too. As the earlier post pointed out, bipedalism is a huge beneift for humans, since it lets us use tools better than other species. Our mental abilities wouldn't be nearly as useful in the absence of tool use.
My cat spends certainly less than an hour per day eating. Going to the litter box takes less than 10 minutes a day. It drinks quite frequently, but it actually sleeps most of the remaining hours.
It's diet consists of Royal Canin.
It certainly doesn't seem to be using the extra time to evolve. In fact, it's a little overweight.
I spend about 2 to 3 hours a day eating. Work about 8 hours a day. Sleep another 8 hours a day. Remaining hours are spent with some sport activity (about 1-2 hours) then idle amusement.
My diet is pretty much like anybody else's in what consists of cooked food.
Since everybody knows that anecdote == fact and that everything I say is logically sound, I'm now declaring the TFA bull crap.
This comment is free of charge, but donations are welcome.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
It's not a hypothesis: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/18/2659297.htm
Cultures vary obviously.
Also, the only known pig in Afghanistan (which is kept at the zoo for curiosity) was quarantined due to the swine flu scare. Semitic peoples do not eat pig.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
I've had 2 cockatiels and a red rumped grass parrot (they prefer walking).
I'm almost convinced that these parrots could 'see' fingernails as beaks. So the common human approach to a parrot is with 5 'beaks' coming at them. I tried using a single finger or a pinch (forefinger/thumb) with some success.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Just being highly adaptable to the environment is our strongest suit
Except we weren't particularly adaptable to our environment until less than ten thousand years ago, when we invented cities.
Yet we (or our non-homo-sapiens ancestors) had been using tools and fire for hundreds of thousands of years before that.
So clearly we had sufficient intelligence to (as the GP says) teach kids to build fires without showing the least scintilla of the kind of intelligence that writes operas, solves equations or builds space craft. Lots of creatures use tools. None of them come close to anything like specifically human intelligence.
So fire use and tool making are clearly not sufficiently interesting for evolution to work strongly on directly, or we would have seen something more interesting happen in the hundreds of thousands of years preceding the invention of agriculture and cities (or even the neolithic revolution or whatever it's called, which preceded cities by some tens of thousands of years.)
Or we would have seen the same selection effects at work on other tool-using species. Hasn't happened, and while you can make up reasons for this the most plausible explanation, to me, is that it hasn't because there is simply no great advantage in being a marginally better tool-user, which is all evolution can produce.
There is a huge gap between "teaching your kids to use fire" and "building a city" or "writing an epic poem". Evolution, without sexual selection, has no way of bridging that gap.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Based on the human body and the fact that Docosahexaenoic Acid (DHA) is so utterly vital to our health and to our brains, the leading theory is that the early hominids who rapidly evolved much larger brains was due to an abundance of seafood in their diet, not savanna meat.
No where in the article is this mentioned. I'm almost inclined to think that this "article" is another one of these that has been surreptitiously sponsored by an industry - in this case not the pharmaceutical industry but the meat industry.
Anyhow, read for yourself the convincing data about why our ancestors were probably seafood eaters and not hunters as has traditionally believed. Furthermore, if you simply ask yourself how many restaurants there are in the world where meat is served raw - which for species which are truly carnivorous is the way it is consumed and to which their digestive tracks have adapted - vs. how many there are where seafood is served raw. Sashimi anyone?
I'm guessing you mean the boas when you say "not a threat to life". My friend did say that she had to learn how to feed them right to keep them friendly and docile. It turned out to be about two mice per week. And she also said she'd had an earlier snake that she fed too well, so it grew to be too big for her to handle or wear as jewelry. She donated it to a local zoo, where it was still living the last I heard, and got a new baby boa.
I've read that most of the "show" cobras are defanged. The story I read about the house cobras somewhere in India made the point that they weren't defanged, because they were there primarily for rodent control. The writer also said that the cobras and humans really didn't interact much. Nobody picks up a cobra and cuddles it. The cobras are almost entirely nocturnal, and sleep in their nest until the humans turn the lights (and/or fires) out. If people get up at night for some reason, the cobras just quietly slither out of the way. The writer also mentioned being a bit worried the couple of times that people picked up a cobra and moved it somewhere. Nothing happened, though, presumably because the cobra was accustomed to humans being about. To its little brain, humans are harmless and too big to eat, so we're just ignored as part of the scenery.
I also remember being a little dubious about there never being interactions with children. But the story really didn't say that much on the topic, other than that the locals didn't think there was a problem. This was contrasted with their very similar disbelief that the Europeans huge dogs weren't a danger to children. Of course, we know that some of them are, but that behavior has mostly been bred out of our dogs by the custom that a dog who harms a child simply dies. I wouldn't be surprised if these cobras were really semi-domesticated over the centuries, and made harmless by the same draconian rule.
The usual term for this sort of relationship is "feral", rather than "domesticated". I lived in Florida for a few years, and a lot of people there like the little lizards that are everywhere. They might not have liked them at first, but after seeing a few of them carrying of a cockroach for a meal, you're likely to decide that the little critters are really cute. But they're not pets; they just live in your house and eat your roaches (and keep out of your way).
I also did a small amount of googling, and found references to a few other cases in India where people (mostly rich people) have pet cobras that they like show to visitors, but they're all defanged. They probably get fed dead mice from pet stores, as my friend's boa did. Mice are cheap, and you can get them from pet stores nearly anywhere.
It is interesting that humans seem to like dangerous pets. In our case, in addition to our cockatiels (mostly harmless), we have a blue-crowned conure, and she has a seriously dangerous beak. We've seen her crack open cherry pits. (Try that with your teeth. ;-) She could crack a finger bone as easily. It took us about a month before we weren't nervous of her beak. Now we understand her, and we don't consider her dangerous. She is a cute, cuddly little creature who likes to play. But when visitors stick out their hands towards her and she makes a threat face, we warn them off. She's afraid of strangers, and she could hurt them if they don't know how to handle her. I'd estimate that she's about as dangerous as the average house cat or a medium-size dog. After all, they are predators with a mouthful of sharp teeth and some dangerous claws. She has one big, strong beak that she keeps honed to a needle point, plus 8 claws that are roughly comparable to cat or dog claws. Just the sort of critter that we humans like to keep as cute house pets. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.