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How Sliced Meat May Have Driven Human Evolution (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: The most tedious part of a chimpanzee's life is chewing. Our primate cousins spend six hours a day gnashing fruits and the occasional monkey carcass — all made possible by the same type of big teeth and large jaws our early ancestors had. So why are our own teeth and jaws so much smaller? A new study credits the advent of simple stone tools to slice meat and pound root vegetables, which could have dramatically reduced the time and force needed to chew, thus allowing our more immediate ancestors to evolve the physical features required for speech. The abstract for the (paywalled) article is more informative than many.
And the other small factor they missed.. Cooking!
They "missed" it, huh? Why is cooking discussed in detail in TFA and even mentioned twice in the abstract then?
Cooking has a large known effect on consumption and abduction of food. Especially meat. Resulting in needing to eat less quantity and being easier to chew..
Yes. No one disputes it. It's mentioned in the article. Problem is: best evidence now is that cooking only started in a controlled way a few hundred thousand years ago, maybe 500,000 at the most. Meanwhile, the changes actually mentioned in TFA began perhaps as early as 2 million years ago. Stone tools were around then (and had been used perhaps as much as 3 million years ago).
No.. That couldn't be a factor.. Must have been those thin slices. Sigh.
Uh, or TFA could explicitly acknowledge multiple times that cooking was a major evolutionary factor, but they're perhaps hypothesizing about a different earlier stage?
Sounds a lot like someone flash of the moment idea that they rushed to publish rather than something with much backing
Rather ironic to read this coming from someone who didn't even take the time to find out what the article was about before posting in ignorance. Is TFA conclusive evidence of anything? Absolutely not -- it's just throwing out a possible idea for a stage of evolution where jaw size and strength decreases, etc. before we have any solid evidence of cooking.
What's your theory?? What's the backing for it?