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: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.