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

Re:Raw food

[Anonymous Coward]

The best recipe for good quality steak:

Put on a cast iron skillet, and make it very hot. There should be a light hint of smoke coming of it.

Then, get your steak (fresh from the butcher) and put it on your plate. Do this well away from the hot stove.

Turn down the heat under the skillet, take your knife and fork and eat your steak.

Mind, this is for good quality steak only.

fast food

[Anonymous Coward]

And fast food made us american!

vegetarians

[Errtu76]

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?

Re:vegetarians

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it means your line will eventually become extinct

Re:vegetarians

[JAlexoi]

Is there a particular reason you think your children will be vegetarian? A maybe a religion? Or will you just brainwash them into your way of life?
If you think that your children will fall in love only with a vegetarian(That would be messing with their lives very dramatically), then maybe some permanent changes may occur. But only if vegetarians really need to have bigger stomachs to digest the required amount of food.

Re:vegetarians

[GaryOlson]

Before that eventuality, your descendants' brain sizes will be shrinking. Either:

-- your descendants smaller brain sizes guarantee lives as grocery cart attendants, or

-- your descendants brains processing will become more efficient as their brain size shrinks in order to maintain parity with the other humans.

Either way they will be freaks.

Re:Not Quite.

[MrMr]

You mean gasoline prices are now a driving force for human evolution?

Tasty

[ozmanjusri]

Cooking may not have made us human, but it certainly makes us crispy.

Re:Tasty

[Will.Woodhull]

Just stew on that for a while...

Re:Raw food

[soupforare]

Denny's serves meat now?

Re:If you think that through...

[binarylarry]

Excellent.

Now when I gorge and eat a whole 5000 calorie pizza, I can say it's making me smarter!

Re:Not Quite.

[Zixaphir]

So... we couldn't be the most physically fit, so we evolved a superiour trait? HAX

Re:Not Quite.

[toriver]

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.

Re:It changed our relationships with animals as we

[elrous0]

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.