From Studying Chimps, a Theory on Cooking

[groovedaddy]

Richard Wrangham, a primatologist and anthropologist, has spent four decades observing wild chimpanzees in Africa to see what their behavior might tell us about prehistoric humans. Dr. Wrangham, 60, was born in Britain and since 1989 has been at Harvard, where he is a professor of biological anthropology. He is about to publish another book, “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.” He was interviewed over a vegetarian lunch at last winter’s American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago and again later by telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows.
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Q. In your new book, you suggest that cooking was what facilitated our evolution from ape to human. Until now scientists have theorized that tool making and meat eating set the conditions for the ascent of man. Why do you argue that cooking was the main factor?

A. All that you mention were drivers of the evolution of our species. However, our large brain and the shape of our bodies are the product of a rich diet that was only available to us after we began cooking our foods. It was cooking that provided our bodies with more energy than we’d previously obtained as foraging animals eating raw food.

I have followed wild chimpanzees and studied what, and how, they eat. Modern chimps are likely to take the same kinds of foods as our early ancestors. In the wild, they’ll be lucky to find a fruit as delicious as a raspberry. More often they locate a patch of fruits as dry and strong-tasting as rose hips, which they’ll masticate for a full hour. Chimps spend most of their day finding and chewing extremely fibrous foods. Their diet is very unsatisfying to humans. But once our ancestors began eating cooked foods — approximately 1.8 million years ago — their diet became softer, safer and far more nutritious.

And that’s what fueled the development of the upright body and large brain that we associate with modern humans. Earlier ancestors had a relatively big gut and apelike proportions. Homo erectus, our more immediate ancestor, has long legs and a lean, striding body. In fact, he could walk into a Fifth Avenue shop today and buy a suit right off a peg.

Our ancestors were able to evolve because cooked foods were richer, healthier and required less eating time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/science/21conv.html?th&emc=th

[gblady]

1. interesting.....

thanks for sharing!

[HamdenRice]

2. Leading to that pinacle of evolution -- the French chef

Actually pretty interesting. I didn't realize cooking started that far back.

[Thor_MN]

4. Lord love Julia Child, but I don't know that you could describe her as "upright"

at least later in life.

[tinrobot]

3. What does this say about the raw food movement?

[HamdenRice]

5. I read the article yesterday. There's actually no proof yet of his theory.

The bigger picture the article points out is that Wrangham thinks that cooking speeded evolution. The prior consensus is sort of that evolution caused cooking.

Wrangham thinks hominids have been cooking for 1.8 million years. But there is only archaeological evidence of cooking going back 800,000 years.

He's convinced that we will find evidence of cooking going back another million years, but so far there isn't any.

[semillama]

6. It's a definite needle in a haystack proposition, but not impossible

The big problem is site preservation. Basically, you're looking for a campsite probably used once by a small group of hominids, 1.8 million years ago. And that campsite is probably not in a rock shelter, like the earliest known hearths are, but probably out on the savannah. And that fire at the campsite is probably not dug into the ground, making the evidence easier to dissipate.

What would be easier (relatively) to look for are fossilized animal remains with evidence of butchery, and then examine those for any signs of cooking. This might be difficult, since heating of bone may not translate into something that fossilizes, and highly-burnt bone tends to be pretty fragile and doesn't preserve well.

But these are some of the avenues that could be followed in testing the hypothesis.
It's certainly more plausible than the "aquatic ape" idea.

[HamdenRice]

7. Problem is ...

As I understand it, that they have definitely found fossils of animal bones that have been butchered by early hominids. For later hominids they've found animal bones that have been both butchered and burned.

But I agree that they probably did not have settled hearths like later hominids.