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."

Comments

guy has it backwards

[gurps_npc]

Intelligence created our digestive track, not the other way around.

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.)