Cooking Stimulated Big Leap In Human Cognition 473
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.'"
TV Science (Score:3, Insightful)
This just in: slashdot editors watch the history channel for their science news.
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.
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:2, Insightful)
I am not a biologist, but I do know that traits acquired by the parents, such as the presumed increased intelligence due to cooked food (Which I don't think would actually happen, but who knows?), would not be passed to their children. You could try to sort animals by liking to cooked food, hoping to get the ones with the 'best' genes, but even that would be dubious science at best.
Re:Hah! I knew it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:3, Insightful)
It helps that we cooked veggies too.
I mean, what is a burger without pickles, grilled onions, grilled mushrooms, and bread?
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:4, Insightful)
I am not a biologist, but I do know that traits acquired by the parents, such as the presumed increased intelligence due to cooked food (Which I don't think would actually happen, but who knows?), would not be passed to their children.
The theory would be not that eating cooked food made them smarter.
The theory would be that cooking food made it biologically feasible for their offspring to develop smaller digestive systems and larger, more calorie-hungry brains. However for that to happen the genes would have to be created and expressed. This necessarily means it happened to the offspring of the ones who started eating cooked food.
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.
Re:Old and bent news (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:more energy *because* we have bigger brains (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea is that an animal cannot normally support a brain as big as ours. The brain becomes a liability rather than an asset. When you invent something that makes calories easier to come by, the biggest liability of the brain -- high energy demands -- is minimized, and the benefits favour growing bigger brains.
In that scenario, cooking is an enabling technology that lets you go from a slightly-larger-than-an-ape brain to the monstrosity that we currently possess.
The process of growing an individual brain has nearly nothing to do with it.
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:4, Insightful)
Hunting is a time consuming activity, and meat is perishable compared to vegetables.
Civilization arose because of beans!
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:4, Insightful)
Cooking also destroys bacteria, which means the digestive tract isn't challenged so constantly. It also helps preserve meat, which means you don't have to eat it the same day. Once you learn to smoke meat you can keep it a much longer time.
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as I know, fire/cooking predates farming. Most estimates place the origins of farming 10,000 years ago, and according to the summary, cooking developed 200,000 years ago. So while humans may have been cooking wild plants, I imagine a major advantage of cooking was allowing you to store meat much longer.
You're right about civilization being based on high calorie domesticated agriculture, but your timing is a little off.
Re:[OFFTOPIC] (Score:3, Insightful)
Rape someone, cut off the penis
Working from memory here as I am feeling too lazy to look it up again (not to mention grumpy due to various drama), but a lot of rape cases aren't really about sex, but rather about control and power.
The evidence for this is in the fact that, even after castration (chemical or otherwise), repeat offenders have been known to do it again; sometimes using things like broom handles or the like in order to commit the crime if they are no longer able to get/maintain an erection.
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:4, Insightful)
I think cooking pretty directly allowed farming, by giving both time (cooking gathered plants allowed less time spent gathering, leaving time for farming) and motivation (if you can "gather" in your own back yard, there's no need to go to the wild and expose yourself to the predators and human enemies) for it.
I don't know if cooking *really* brings anything extra to preserving meat. Drying meat surely predates cooking, though cooking before drying might make the whole process faster, and help it stay good longer... But probably not a dramatic improvement.
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, I don't remember our Innuit ancestors who discovered bronze working, iron, or eventually the scientific revolution. Oh wait. That's right. That was mostly meat-eaters.
Don't be a colossal bonehead, do a little research. The Inuit live in the Arctic, and traditionalists can survive on the ice, making things out of bones and gut and skin and snow and eating mammals and fish. They're at just about the pinnacle of paleolithic tech, and I'd like to see any of your grain-munchin' bath-averse bronze-waving ancestors last a season up there.
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:4, Insightful)
And repelling flies keeps maggots out of the meat, meaning less waste before it gets dried out to the point that it no longer interests flies. Most primitives to this day don't give a flip about flies, they're just a fact of life. But meat consumed by (or ruined by) maggots rather than yourself... that WAS your dinner, so maggots are distinctly undesirable.
Given this chain of thought, and that primitives didn't know fly eggs hatch into maggots -- I begin to suspect that it wasn't the flies they cared about preventing, but rather, the maggots... ie. the same "magic" that prevented maggots happened to discourage flies too. What a coincidence!
Salt or sugar curing can help achieve the same goal -- even if the meat still attracts flies, it's no longer viable for maggots (nor for most bacterias); either disrupts their water balance rather drastically.
Re:Hah! I knew it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:AUGGGHHH (Score:3, Insightful)
That's probably true (especially given that many primitives eat grubs of various sorts). So it's not an exact "reason" for smoking meat, but rather a nebulous cloud of reasons that happen to all wind up with the same goal (edible meat) and result (preserved meat).
Which is true of many such developments -- they're not either/or situations, but rather an accumulation of loosely related processes, and sometimes of outright coincidences.