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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.
Surprised they didn't mention that a longer lasting tooth would have been a huge advantage as well:
"Slicing, whether with a knife or a sharp stone flake, changes all that. Suddenly, hominins could cut up the elastic muscles of a carcass into smaller bits before putting them in their mouths, making them chewable and easier to digest. Pounding has a similar effect on tough, fibrous root vegetables. “What we found is that by simply slicing meat and pounding vegetables, a hominin would be able to reduce the number of chews they use by about 17%,” Zink says. “That equates to 2-and-a-half million fewer chews per year.”
Imagine a 17% less worn tooth. Tooth loss is a huge disadvantage in the wild, just look at how desperate large predators get when they cannot hunt effectively.
An individual living 17% longer would be able to learn and pass on their knowledge and build a more effective society, perhaps even helping invent fire along the way.
Small teeth can just as easily eat a whole animal as big teeth. Teeth aren't just used for chewing but for attacking and taking down prey. It was tools that allowed humans to take down prey without the need for biting that allowed smaller mouths to be evolutionarily OK.
And beyond that, COOKING the meat was far more advantageous than tools to slice it.
"Sliced bread makes us evolutionarily superior"
Yeesh.. this isn't science, this is drunken bar talk...
Putting it in the bottom of a bowl before filling it with lobscouse will render it edible by the time you're down to it. Or you can pound it back to flour, mix it with suet and some leavening, and bake it again to make duff, or bag the dough and boil it to make pudding duff.
Knives don't really replace chewing, fire does that.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Sounds great! I would like to subscribe to your cooking blog.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I always thought they were for building emergency shelters....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Or dwarf bread for that matter
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?