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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."
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.
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?
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?
"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.
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
Cooking may not have made us human, but it certainly makes us crispy.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
"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.
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
"There are levels in between raw and burnt."
Raw, Warm and Bloody, Medium, Denny's, Burnt
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!
Denny's serves meat now?
--- Do you believe in the day?
Because I heard exactly the same thing on TV report more than 5 years ago !
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
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.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
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.
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
The Pottenger Experiments.
While that research might be fine when it comes to cats (I have no knowledge of the field, and I can't be bothered to Google for any scholarly papers to back up the assertions on a website) you are aware that that's completely inapplicable to digestion and nutrition in humans? The issue here is that cats are carnivores and humans are omnivores; the evidence for this is in our dentition, but you can bet that our guts will be at least as different.
Humans have been cooking food for a long long time, through a number of population constrictions. It's entirely possible that we have adaptations that make us better than most animals at dealing with cooked food. Whether we actually have or not is a good question, but evidence from other mammals won't help.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
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.
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!
Excellent.
Now when I gorge and eat a whole 5000 calorie pizza, I can say it's making me smarter!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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"
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?
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.
I'm not saying either method is more efficient, I'm just pointing out that we can't draw any conclusions without looking at the entire process.
The possibility that comes to mind, however, is this:
--Cooking food changes the chemical structure of the food. For example, the collagen in meat is converted to a more gelatinous form, which requires less energy to digest. Call this change in energy delta-Y.
--At the same time, enzymes in the food are partially destroyed during the cooking process, which must be replaced with enzymes produced by the body. Call the energy required to produce these enzymes X.
--If X is less than delta-Y, then we have a net gain.
--To use simple numbers, (and I'm pulling these out of my ass): if we reduce the energy required to digest meat by 25% by cooking it, but see a 10% increase in energy required to account for the initial production of enzymes, then we still have a positive gain in energy.
For example, consider this: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VNH-4PF6B6Y-2&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=a45168786fdaed44067b0781c320b9e3
I realize this is a study involving snakes, so take it it with a *big* grain of salt.
The big question in all this, that no one has shown numbers for (or maybe I missed it), is what percentage of total energy required to digest food does the production of the enzymes account for? If enzyme production is only 1% of the total energy required, it is a whole different story than if it accounted for 70%. Without any hard numbers, we can't really say anything conclusive.
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.
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.
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.
You didn't read the article. This is exactly the research that was done to come to the conclusion that cooked food allowed us more free time. Humans on a raw food diet were one subject -- they tend to be undernourished even when they seems to have an adequate calorie intake. To verify this, studies were done on humans who had their small intestines removed (the intestines were removed before the study due to unrelated medical complications). These humans allowed the researches to see that significantly less nutrition is extracted from uncooked food in the human stomach than is extracted from cooked food. The difference was huge; a human would need to eat nearly twice as much uncooked fod to get the same nutrition as from cooked food.
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
One other thing to be said about raw meat is that your young grain fed prime beef is a far cry from the tough gamey meat you get from a wild animal of indeterminate age. I think you'd prefer to have that meat cooked regardless of your preference now.
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'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.