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Cooking Stimulated Big Leap In Human Cognition
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Aug 12, 2008 06:09 PM
from the yet-another-preprocessor dept.
from the yet-another-preprocessor dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "For a long time, humans were pretty dumb, doing little but make 'the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years,' says Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai. Then, 150,000 years ago, our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials. We started creating art and maybe even religion. To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, researchers examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism. The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, although definitive claims of causation are premature. In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, thereby freeing up calories for our brains. Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and allocate around 20% of their total energy to the brain, compared to approximately 13% for non-human primates and 2-8% for other vertebrates. While other theories for the brain's cognitive spurt have not been ruled out, the finding sheds light on what made us, as Khaitovich put it, 'so strange compared to other animals.'"
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AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Funny)
We man got smarts by cooking meats you vegan bitches!!! UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH (think Home Improvement)
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, this implies just the opposite. Cell membranes (meat) are easy for the body to break down. Cell walls (plants) are quite difficult, and cooking greatly facilitates their digestion. Cooking meat usually somewhat increases its caloric density (by driving water off, making it denser), but *decreases* its total calories (by driving fat off and breaking some proteins down). Cooking plants doesn't increase their calories, but generally makes them more bioavailable. It also lets you eat a more diverse variety of plants; many wild plants are toxic in their uncooked form, and heat denatures the toxins. In many more, heat won't denature the toxins, but repeated boils in changes of water can get rid of them. And, apart from some certain hunter gatherer societies (such as the Innuit), most hunter-gatherer groups get about 80% of their calories from plants.
So, really, it's just the opposite of what you're suggesting.
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Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah that's exactly what women look for in a man: intelligence.
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Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Funny)
It helps that we cooked veggies too.
I mean, what is a burger without pickles, grilled onions, grilled mushrooms, and bread?
Meatloaf.
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Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Interesting)
Only uncooked.
If you fry mushrooms in a little butter or oil, grill them slowly, or simmer them for a little while until they give up their liquids, their taste and texture changes quite a bit.
There's a lot of flavor in mushrooms and there's a lot of umami [wikipedia.org] in them -- basically it enhances the flavors of other things. The texture changes from a slightly dry and chalky one to a 'meatier' denser bite. Grilled portabello mushroom goes well into a bun like a burger, and also makes a fantastic taco filling cut into strips.
Button mushrooms may not be the most flavorful of all of our mushrooms, but, properly prepared there's a lot of taste to be had in button mushrooms. In a curry for example, mushrooms bring a lot of their own flavor as well as soaking up a lot of the other flavors, you just have to know how to cook 'em right.
I usually cook between 2 and 4 lbs of mushrooms per week -- trust me, they're quite tasty. =)
Cheers
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Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Funny)
Your sig is oddly and disturbingly appropiate.
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Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Funny)
What did the last one taste like?
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Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Informative)
Don't worry about liking sushi. Most of the calories are in the rice, and that part is cooked. In fact, "sushi" actually means that sticky rice. The slices of fish supply a bit of protein, and the veggies supply a few vitamins, which you need, though they're really there to give the rice a bit more flavor. But the cooked rice is almost pure carbohydrate in an easily-digested form that is quickly-available fuel for your muscles and brain.
Note that rice nicely illustrates the writer's hypothesis. In its raw form, rice is hard, dense, and nearly indigestible. But when cooked, rice breaks down into simple carbs that your digestive system quickly turns into sugars. This "fuel" is so easily available that it leads to the well known "an hour later you're hungry again" phenomenon. Of course, most grains work about the same way. And this also shows that the article isn't exactly describing a new concept. Many people have inferred from the archaeological evidence that the start of real advances in human society coincided with the development of agriculture, in particular the domestication of grains. That gave us a high-energy food that was easy to digest. The only problem was that eating just grains is boring. So you start mixing in things with flavor, and before you know it, you've invented cuisine.
The real heroes in our evolution were the ones that developed cooking utensils. ;-)
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If that was true.... (Score:5, Funny)
then America would be choke full of obese geniuses.
Cooking required for living in cold climates (Score:5, Insightful)
So when humans moved into the colder parts of Europe they would have needed ways to gather enough food to avoid starvation. Perhaps cooking made that easier by broadening their diet.
Wait, what? (Score:5, Funny)
1. Sit on duff for 2 million years being too stupid to invent anything
2. ???
3. Invent cooking
4. Get smart enough to invent things, like cooking
5. Profit!
I've heard homeless men coming up with more logical explanations than this.
The start of the Singularity... (Score:5, Interesting)
The singularity model (some say fantasy, some say theory, call it what you will) is basically that once technology can be used to improve intelligence you get a feedback loop that leads to a society and environment that is literally incomprehensible to the people on the low side of the singularity. This is usually proposed in terms of *designing* brains that are smarter than the ones that designed them, but there's no reason to rule out less fantastic advances as part of the same process.
I think this qualifies as a singularity, from the point of view of the pre-humans.
Re:The start of the Singularity... (Score:5, Insightful)
I gather the idea is that the singularity is the point at which the rate of change is so great that it's almost "vertical", and I'm not sure this would look that way even to proto-humans.
If the rate of change is so flat that it's not perceptible over a single lifespan, which is implied by the comment that it took 2 million years to get from the hand axe to cooking, then everything else has happened in 150 millennia. From that point, what's happened in the past 150 centuries might mostly be comprehensible, but what's happened over the past 150 decades would look pretty close to vertical... and the past 150 years is definitely post-singularity for them.
The singularity isn't an event, and there isn't just one event horizon... think about falling into a black hole: once you pass the event horizon you don't stop there, you keep falling, and there's always another event horizon just ahead of you. Technology is like that: it's a process, and from a distant enough viewpoint we are already on the far side of an event horizon.
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Re:The start of the Singularity... (Score:5, Insightful)
One tenant of the technological singularity is that we are completely unequipped to predict what the other side will look like. Our pre-cooking, small brain energy ancestors would certainly be unequipped to predict today's world.
I like your analogy.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
If you give them a couple million years to mutate, yes. Provided my step-mother isn't the one who cooks the animals meals of course, in which case they'd devolve faster than you can say "that steak is raw!".
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Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
Only if a large stone obelisk moves into the neighborhood at the same time...
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Re:Suddenly... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm betting there's a giant black monolith [wikipedia.org] involved ... (cue Richard Strauss [wikipedia.org] music)
There, fixed that for you.
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Re:Humans were carnivores at the beginning (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Humans were carnivores at the beginning (Score:5, Funny)
Then we got really smart....and started fermenting our veggies/grains, and invented BEER!! That way we could drink it!!
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Re:An interesting experiment (Score:5, Interesting)
how many generations have pigs been slopped from table scraps?
do domesticated pigs have higher IQs than wild boars?
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Re:Enabler, not cause. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is 150,000 years ago. These people had no electricity, no medicine, no civilization... basically, they had nothing. Average life expectancy was something around 30 years, if that. Break a leg, you're dead. Get the flu, good chance you're dead. Run into a saber tooth tiger, you're definitely dead. At this point of history that they're talking about, humans were *not* at the top of the food chain, there was no civilization where a person could seek shelter, there were no medications, diet was iffy. And there were plenty of nasty animals running around ready to eat a person!
Something else in the environment? I don't think you appreciate just how difficult it is to live off the land and survive out in the wilderness. Particularly when you're not at the top of the food chain.
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Re:Enabler, not cause. (Score:5, Informative)
There is animal language, art, culture, and economics. Animals aren't self-analytical, but they are minimally creative and have abstract communication.
Primates and parrots have been taught vocabularies equivalent to preschoolers. They recognize abstractions such as number and color. They not only make tools, but different populations make different kinds of tools. They pass this knowledge on to their offspring, indicating the existence of culture. Some animals have rudimentary economics and can recognize fair and unfair trades. And even birds create art, though if you are speaking of representational art, the list is much smaller.
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Re:Enabler, not cause. (Score:5, Informative)
Art? Depends on your definition. Whale songs aren't understood, dolphins (and other animals) certainly seem to play and generally "do stuff" just for the hell of it. We have a hard time defining human art these days, I'd reserve judgement on non-humans...
Science? True, I'm not aware of any systematic attempts to understand the world building on the experiences of others. I'm not sure I'd call it a fundamental trait, though. It's certainly important to mankind as we know it, but science in my opinion is enabled by too many more fundamental abilities of the human mind to be considered fundamental itself.
Law? There are certainly hierarchies and rules in animal societies. Nothing written down, and no trials as far as I know. Morals, concepts of right and wrong? Hard to say. That requires empathy, primates might exhibit something like a sense of moral.
Culture? What do you mean by culture? I addressed the art part of culture above, that leaves customs specific to a society of animals. I don't think you can just plain say there are no different cultures in animal societies.
No literature? True, no argument.I Don't think it's fundamental in the sense I meant, though. It's a function enabled by a higher degree of intelligence.
Economics... Well, hard to say again. Economics as the systematic study of transactions and their effects on society? No, you won't find that. Understanding of profit versus risk? Certainly on some level that's there. Here's a New Scientist article on macaque monkeys paying for sex: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/sex/mg19726374.100-macaque-monkeys-pay-for-sex.html [newscientist.com]
As for self-analytical, any being that learns from experience is in a sense self-analytical.
Creative? Every species has at some point learned new tricks. Monkeys use sticks to fish for insects - I don't think that's a trait hard wired into their brain. Once upon a time, a monkey got creative and learned the trick, then probably a portion of the other members of the species were smart enough to learn the trick, having seen it, or maybe only that one monkey was clever enough, but by learning a good new trick, gained a clear reproductive edge over the others, and some of it's offspring were sufficiently smart to either learn the trick by seeing it performed, or by figuring it out themselves. And so on. In any case, at some point, a monkey got creative.
Abstract communication? Maybe, frankly I'm not fully sure what you even mean by that. My point is, people have historically been very keen on making these blanket statements on just how we fundamentally are different from the rest of the animals (or, often, "the animals"), and the claims tend to not hold up to scrutiny. The human mind is a remarkably complex thing, but it is born of the nervous system, which is a product of evolution. It's tempting to think of some kind of magic point of complexity or whatever you wish to think creates consciousness where a mind turns from animal to human, but I don't think we'll find one. Consciousness is not something you either have or don't, there are degrees. Sometimes we're not conscious of our actions, like when driving a car down a long, straight road. It's not inconceivable that a being could be more conscious than a human being, so I don't think it's inconceivable that a being could be less so, and still be conscious. It's a matter of degree.
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Re:And Prometheus said... (Score:5, Funny)
Fire. Is there ANYTHING it can't do?
Stop your liver being pecked out each day by a giant Eagle, apparently.....
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Re:Hah! I knew it. (Score:5, Informative)
There's no flavor left when it's well done.
Meat should only be cooked enough to be safe to eat. Anything more than that is just burning the flavor and texture of the meat away.
For a steak from an FDA-approved source, that means red or possibly pink in the middle. For ground beef from an FDA-approved source, pink in the middle (because the grinding process mixes the outside surface into the middle of the beef, so it needs to be cooked more). If you personally trust the source of the meat (was the animal healthy) and the slaughterhouse to have kept the meat uncontaminated, there's no need to cook meat at all (steak tartar).
Meat does not require cooking to be 100% digestible by the human gut. Nor do fruiting plants where the fruit is a deliberate part of the seed-propagation strategy (most of what's called fruits and berries). Cooking may still be useful to minimize the risk of biological contamination. On the other hand, most starchy vegetables (tubers, grains, pulses) have more bioavailable calories after cooking. Like 100-1000% more calories.
Further, whenever you consume the actual seed of a plant (grains, pulses, nuts, etc.), you often also have to overcome the defensive toxins that the plant was using to prevent the loss of reproductive potential (they don't propagate if every animal can consume the whole ovary). Drying and cooking are the most effective way, by far, to eliminate and defuse the risks of those chemicals.
Sometimes, like with soy (phytates and phytoestrogens/isoflavones), cooking isn't good enough, and you need fermentation or another process to eliminate the toxins before they're safe to eat. Too bad most soy-food processing doesn't do that, so the defensive toxins end up in most of the processed crap made from soy protein and soy oil on the supermarket shelves. Soy sauce, miso, tempeh, and natto are safe. Most other soy-based foods are not.
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