Cavemen Cooked 2 Million Years Ago - And It Was Due To Efficiency

Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - 14:20 in Biology & Nature

Cooking is not a modern invention, concludes new research.   It likely originated 1.9 million years ago, according to results they determined using statistical analysis and evolutionary trees.How so? They estimated,  in their analysis, how long we should spend feeding every day, based on our body sizes throughout evolutionary history.   Sure, it might seem at first glance like cooking would add more time than directly eating but their results say we would need to spend almost half of our time in the 'feeding' process given our current sizes - cooking basically made food easier to chew and digest and as a result we got more caloric benefit and a smaller digestive tract. read more

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