2arrs, 2ells - Richard Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist,...

6th August 2009

Quote reblogged from All the Alex Bain you can handle! with 5 notes

Richard Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist, published a fascinating book called “Catching Fire,” in which he argues that it was the discovery of cooking by our early ancestors — not tool-making or language or meat-eating — that made us human. By providing our primate forebears with a more energy-dense and easy-to-digest diet, cooked food altered the course of human evolution, allowing our brains to grow bigger (brains are notorious energy guzzlers) and our guts to shrink. It seems that raw food takes much more time and energy to chew and digest, which is why other primates of our size carry around substantially larger digestive tracts and spend many more of their waking hours chewing: up to six hours a day. (That’s nearly as much time as Guy Fieri devotes to the activity.) Also, since cooking detoxifies many foods, it cracked open a treasure trove of nutritious calories unavailable to other animals. Freed from the need to spend our days gathering large quantities of raw food and then chewing (and chewing) it, humans could now devote their time, and their metabolic resources, to other purposes, like creating a culture.

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I know that everyone linked to this fantastic Michael Pollan article, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, when it was published last week, but it’s so long that it took me a while to “digest” (bad pun).

I’ve never seen the above argument even hinted at anywhere else. I’d point out that fire is a tool, as used in cooking, so this isn’t entirely inconsistent with the notion of tools making us superior. Calories are so (overly) abundant in the U.S. these days that it’s hard to imagine a more efficient use of energy as being an evolutionary advantage, or that chewing was a huge waste of time.

What’s interesting is that Pollan’s article simultaneously argues that American’s are using much of the time freed up today by cooking less to work even more than ever before, and more than other cultures, which would have to be another source of advantage.

I can’t imagine how we could strip any more “inefficiency” out of the process of cooking and eating, so perhaps the next frontier is sleep!

(via alexbain)

Reblogged only to say that if you had cross-registered and take HEB 1030, you most certainly would have heard Wrangham’s cooking hypothesis :-P

Source: alexbain