Eating Cooked Food Made Us Human
Cooked Food Made Us Human Wikimedia CommonsRaw food takes too long to digest and offers too few calories to grow a human brain. Cooking it is the key. Gathered around a blazing fire, our ancient ancestors probably huddled to pass the archaic kebab, munching cooked meat and figuring out how they might share it and plan to get more of it. Eating cooked food allowed these early hominids to spend less time gnawing on raw material and digesting it, providing time--and energy--to do other things instead, like socialize. The strenuous cognitive demands of communicating and socializing forced human ancestors to develop more powerful brains, which required more calories--calories that cooked food provided. Cooking, in other words, allowed us to become human. A new paper examines the metabolic restrictions of a raw diet, and suggests that our primate cousins are limited by their inability to heat their dinners. It bolsters the cooking...