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

1.9 Million or 150,000 years ago?

[plsuh]

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

Re:vegetarians

[fosterNutrition]

No. Evolution works only on traits produced by genetic mutation, NOT traits acquired through behaviour. This was one of the flaws in early theories of evolution: it was believed that actions of the parent could influence the genetics of the child, which is not the case. The standard example is giraffes: under the incorrect theory, one could say "they developed longer necks because they stretched them to reach high leaves", but the correct interpretation is instead "the ones with longer-than-average necks could feed better, and hence had more children".

The reason for this is that the genetic material passed on through reproduction comes entirely from the cells in your reproductive organs, so no matter how much you train your neck (or stomach, in your case), none of those changes can in any way get passed to your children, because those cells just aren't involved in the process.

Re:If you think that through...

[biryokumaru]

Actually, it's a widely accepted fact that cooking food vastly increased the amount of calories early man could consume and led directly to the development of higher functions. If anything, this article is about 40-50 years too late to be considered newsworthy.

Re:It changed our relationships with animals as we

[Kenneth Stephen]

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:

Hiss of Death
Next Showing: Wednesday 7 October at 8pm
The King Cobra is the largest venomous snake on the planet, but in a small village in northeast Thailand the King Cobra has become a welcome resident. In fact, more than half of the village families keep a cobra as a pet . And so the village is known as Ban Kok Sa Nga - 'Serpent Town'. Many people in Kok Sa Nga make their living from the King Cobra, but in a most unusual way. The men fight these spring-coiled serpents barehanded, while the women dance with fully fanged King Cobras in their mouths. If you thought you'd seen snake wrangling before - you haven't seen nothing until you've seen the snake performers of Kok Sa Nga!!

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.