Cooking May Have Made Us Human 253
SpaceGhost writes "Anthropologist Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human believes that the discovery of cooked food led to evolutionary changes resulting in a smaller and different digestive system based on a higher-quality diet, mainly relying on cooked meat. In an interview on NPR's Science Friday (text and audio), Professor Wrangham explores concepts such as the digestive costs of food, the benefits (or lack thereof) of raw diets, and a distinct preference in Great Apes for cooked food over raw."
It changed our relationships with animals as well (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not Quite. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:vegetarians (Score:2, Interesting)
He is positing that many generations will exist in a vegetarian environment and wondering about the results, not wondering about whether the many generations will be successful in teaching the next to only eat vegetables (so evolution is very much in play if you give the hypothetical question a fair reading).
Also, take a look at epigenetics, there is evidence building that parents can mark their own DNA in ways that alter expression in the child (the genes don't change, the regulation does).
Re:It changed our relationships with animals as we (Score:4, Interesting)
One hypothesis is that domestication of the modern dog came about partially as a result of our ability to cook food.
Another recent hypothesis is that dogs were domesticated for food. If you look at the genetic diversity of dogs, it is highest in southern China where dogs are still eaten. Archaeological evidence also suggests that the oldest dog bones in the area were butchered.
Nonsense (Score:3, Interesting)
Your ideas about evolution are fairly dated. It lacks our new understanding that there are other things that "want" to replicate besides genes. We know are starting to understand that ideas and culture are a replicant who is on par with genes. We call them memes.
When viewed through the idea that memes "want" to replicate--scientific discoveries and things like cooking become memes routing around meatspace constraints. In otherwords, science is not a hindrance to evolution, it *is* evolution. Just not evolution as defined by our earlier understanding of the word.
Re:It changed our relationships with animals as we (Score:3, Interesting)
Which segues into an important question about the effects of domesticating animals on the species that is doing the domestication.
There is no question that the domestication process had a major impact on dogs. There has been a kind of taboo on looking at the other side of this, though: what were the effects on the humanoids, how much did our ancestors change due to the new partnership with dogs? Dogs have changed markedly since their ancestors began associating with humans; does it not seem likely that the human side of this partnership must also have undergone significant changes?
In many ways, our social organizations are more like those of wolves than they are like those apes. Even many of our facial expressions are more wolf-like than ape-like: the social smile comes to mind.
But in eurocentric cultures, any research in this area runs into a taboo about challenging the "god gave man dominion over the animals" of the dominant religious teachings. We might have to wait for the antichristian PETA to free us all from these antiquated beliefs before any scientific progress can be made in this area. <disclaimer>Last sentence may contain "irony" and may even be considered a farce to be reckoned by some.</disclaimer>
Re:Not Quite. (Score:2, Interesting)
Doesn't intelligence make us humans much more fit to our environment?
I'm not sure which is funnier, your comment or that fact that someone modded you insightful.
The specific kind of intelligence found in modern humans--the kind that writes operas and builds space craft and creates the general theory of relativity--is a problem for evolutionary theory because it has no conceivable use in our ancient habitat, and there is no evidence that it was used for anything very interesting back then compared to the vast capacity that we actually know it has. It's as modern humans had the capacity to fly by flapping their arms, but had only been doing so for the past five or ten thousand years, staying Earthbound for the previous millennia.
Human intelligence has the capacity to do things incredibly well that no other organism has the capacity to do at all, and which have no apparent benefit to stone age hunter-gatherers.
The current best theory, which is accessibly described in the book "The Red Queen" is that human intelligence is a peacock's tail: guys who were able to entertain women with humour, art, cleverness of various kinds were more likely to breed. The offspring of those couplings were more likely to appreciate each other's charms, producing a run-away selection effect of the kind that generates other bizarre and functionally useless features in a wide variety of species that have been subject to a similar process of sexual selection.
In the case of humans, because you can't appreciate intelligence without being intelligent yourself, women were dragged along by the same process as men, explaining why there are such tiny differences in male and female intellectual capabilities that you have to do incredibly precise laboratory measurements to see any distinction at all, and even then people will find reasonable grounds to argue about it.
Re:It changed our relationships with animals as we (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no question that the domestication process had a major impact on dogs. There has been a kind of taboo on looking at the other side of this, though: what were the effects on the humanoids, how much did our ancestors change due to the new partnership with dogs? ... any research in this area runs into a taboo about challenging the "god gave man dominion over the animals" of the dominant religious teachings.
Well, perhaps, in the "silly sciences". But among biologists in general, there has been no sign of such a taboo, and this topic is dealt with quite openly. It is well-understood that, as one text I saw recently put it, humans are one of the species with the most symbiotic relationships. We have domesticated several hundred animal species and several thousand plant species. Much of the reason we've been so successful at this is a major human adaptation that is referred to informally as "empathy". We are capable of understanding other species to a much greater degree than they can understand us.
The dog is an interesting case, because it's clear that they differ from their wolf ancestors in that they have a good understanding of human psychology, body language, etc. This is true to a lesser degree in a few other domestic species, notably cats and horses. But most of our domestic animals don't really understand us; we understand them (to varying degrees).
Or course, even with dogs, this takes some learning on our part. I ran across a funny example a few months ago. A writer (whose name I've forgotten) wrote that birds in general are "alien" creatures, with a body language totally unlike ours, and basically incomprehensible to primates like us. My reaction was "What? Is there a problem understanding bird behavior?" But I'd read some of the biological articles on the topic, and (probably more importantly) due to my wife's serious allergies to furry critters, I've lived in a house with birds for several decades. One of them right now is a blue-crowned conure, who was a "rescue" bird. She was found in a tree in a nearby town about 20 years ago, and some people who knew parrots got her to come down for some food. She was nearly starved, and had obviously not been a wild bird. She had a couple of homes for a few years, one of them a friend of ours who had retired, was traveling a lot, and asked if we wanted to give her a home. She has lived with us since.
Now, blue-crowned conures are not in any sense domesticated. It's likely that a very recent ancestor was caught in the wild, and she's the result at most a few generations of breeding (if you can call it that). Her species has no adaptations for living with humans, but she gets along well. And it's obvious that the reason is that we can talk to her in her own language. As the bird books would say, she's now part of a flock that's led by a couple of those funny flightless humans. A year ago, she got outside, and was in a neighbor's tree, totally terrified. We spent an hour "talking" her down to lower and lower branches, until finally she flew to my shoulder and started nibbling my ear. We took her back inside her home, and she shows no interest in that horrible outdoors, except to watch out the window when we're not there, squawking a greeting when we walk up to the house. Just as well; she'd die quickly in the New England winter that's coming, if she didn't starve first. (We also have cockatiels, but they've been domesticated and bred for about 150 years.)
Anyway, this isn't anything at all odd. Around the world, people keep all sorts of "undomesticated" animals as pets. There was a nice example years ago in a National Geographic article that started of talking about an area of India where people express wonder about the Europeans who keep huge "wolves" as pets; aren't they afraid of what those animals will do to their children? The article then went into its topic: In that part of India, people have pet cobras that wander freely around the house. They're not worried about the childre
Cuisine indicates wealth of past cultures. (Score:5, Interesting)
During the Tong Dynasty, China was definitely a wealthy kingdom in the heart of Asia. Here, "wealthy" is a relative term. Though China of that era is likely poorer than Soviet Russia, China was still the richest nation during the time of the Tong Dynasty.
Now, look at Japanese food. It has simple procedures that require few ingredients. Having few resources, the inhabitants of Japan created cuisine that minimized the use of natural resources. Consider raw fish, which was a common food item in ancient Japan. Raw fish requires little preparation beyond just slicing off the flesh.
Here is an exercise for the reader. The Big Mac is the quintessential item in the American cuisine. What does the Big Mac tell us about American civilization?
Re:More efficient? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not saying either method is more efficient, I'm just pointing out that we can't draw any conclusions without looking at the entire process.
The possibility that comes to mind, however, is this:
--Cooking food changes the chemical structure of the food. For example, the collagen in meat is converted to a more gelatinous form, which requires less energy to digest. Call this change in energy delta-Y.
--At the same time, enzymes in the food are partially destroyed during the cooking process, which must be replaced with enzymes produced by the body. Call the energy required to produce these enzymes X.
--If X is less than delta-Y, then we have a net gain.
--To use simple numbers, (and I'm pulling these out of my ass): if we reduce the energy required to digest meat by 25% by cooking it, but see a 10% increase in energy required to account for the initial production of enzymes, then we still have a positive gain in energy.
For example, consider this: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VNH-4PF6B6Y-2&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=a45168786fdaed44067b0781c320b9e3 [sciencedirect.com]
I realize this is a study involving snakes, so take it it with a *big* grain of salt.
The big question in all this, that no one has shown numbers for (or maybe I missed it), is what percentage of total energy required to digest food does the production of the enzymes account for? If enzyme production is only 1% of the total energy required, it is a whole different story than if it accounted for 70%. Without any hard numbers, we can't really say anything conclusive.
Re:It changed our relationships with animals as we (Score:1, Interesting)
Or course, even with dogs, this takes some learning on our part. I ran across a funny example a few months ago. A writer (whose name I've forgotten) wrote that birds in general are "alien" creatures, with a body language totally unlike ours, and basically incomprehensible to primates like us. My reaction was "What? Is there a problem understanding bird behavior?"
Perhaps it meant that we can't interpret the body language without getting used to it. If you have never had a dog but meet one you can pretty easily tell it's mood. (Whether it is happy, scared, anxious...) and it's attitude towards you (Friendly, curious, hostile...). However, if you have never owned a parrot you can't interpret it's mood at all aside from "If it sings joyfully, it is probably happy" but that isn't body language.
I am also a parrot owner - have been for several years - and I've studied them, read about them, talked about them and spent many thousands of hours with a parrot. We know each other's body language very well. If he is on a bookself and stares at me I can pretty easily tell "Oh, that posture, that stare, his crest is like that, he moves like that... Yeah. He obviously wants to start flying, fly to my head and take a nap there but is waiting for me to stop still first." and it is very natural to me.
However, my mother hasn't spend that many thousands of hours with the parrot and can't interpret his body language nearly as well. Often I have to tell her "Stop trying to play with him, can't you see he wants to calm down a bit..." because she doesn't see it from his body language.
It goes the other way around too. The parrot doesn't let her scratch his neck when it is itchy. It isn't any relationship issue, he can walk to my mother and bop his head sideways to tell that his neck is itchy but when my mother tries to scratch it, the parrot doesn't let her. It is because the parrot misinterprets some very minor (to us) thing in her body language, such as the angle of the wrist or how her fingers are...
But someone who has never owned a parrot? If he walked to a person and bopped his head sideways, I am 100% sure that 99% of the people would have no clue that it means that his neck itches. In fact, I'm pretty sure they couldn't even tell if he is tired, scared or in a bad mood. In all of those most people would think "He flies around and screams. He probably isn't happy?" and couldn't interpret anything more.
Re:It changed our relationships with animals as we (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll have to look that up; it sounds impressive.
I don't remember where the NG story was in India; I vaguely recall that it was southerly. I also don't know how large an area they were writing about. It is interesting how many different cultures there are in India. It's one of the most culturally diverse part of the planet. Not that people there always get along, but they do seem to be generally more tolerant of differences than people are in much of the rest of the world.
I wonder if I could find the video of the kid playing with the cobras again. It did make me a bit nervous for the kid, but it was interesting that the snakes just tolerated it and didn't much interact with the kid.
I do also remember that the story said that people didn't really interact with the cobras much. It wasn't at all like our cats or dogs. Mostly the cobras slept in their nest during the day, and came out to hunt mice after the people had gone to sleep. But the writing was clear, that the people there weren't afraid of the cobras.
For that matter, when I was young (8 or 9), I had a friend who had a pet tarantula. He carried it around on his shoulder, or sometimes it would be in his shirt pocket. Again, they didn't really interact all that much. But the spider trusted him, and tolerated being touched by the few people who were brave enough.
I also had a friend some years ago with a pet boa constrictor. She worked part time as a belly dancer, actually, and used the snake in her act, but she carried it around with her at other times, too. She described it as a large piece of jewelry. She could drape it around her body any way she liked, and dance, and the snake would just hang on. She liked the way that most adults were nervous about it, but she could walk up to children and have them handling the snake very quickly. She also said that handling snake was basically just a question of getting to understand them. Even poisonous snakes usually won't harm humans unless they think they're in danger, so you just have to learn how to make the snake trust you. Boa constrictors are completely harmless to people, though, until they get very big.
I'd guess that the Thai snake handlers have worked with their snakes for a long time, understand what makes them nervous, and don't do those things. If the snakes trust you, and have some food in their belly, they'll tolerate being handled as just one of the things those crazy humans do to you.
Re:It changed our relationships with animals as we (Score:2, Interesting)
Another recent hypothesis is that dogs were domesticated for food.
That does not make sense, dogs are carnivores and thus compete with humans for food, twice even, first the food which feeds their prey, and then the prey.
Pigs who are omnivores and can't digest cellulose are already problematic, probably why Judaism and Islam forbids eating them.
Keeping and domesticating dogs in such early stages of civilization just to eat them them seems unlikely. Still the variation of dogs in southern China could be from breeding, but at a much later state when it became a luxury good, think Conspicuous Consumption. Which is another explanation for the mentioned pig-taboo: Too many farmers imitated the few wealthy ones that could afford holding pigs, thus resulting in a famine since no one wanted to be the first to give up pig farming. And to stop this race to the bottom (I think that is the game theory name) in the end "God" via a wise prophet commands them to stop this silliness.
Re:Cuisine indicates wealth of past cultures. (Score:2, Interesting)
Cuisine indicates the wealth of past civilizations. Consider Chinese food. It has complex procedures requiring a wide variety of ingredients. Only a wealthy civilization -- with abundant natural resources -- can afford to create this kind of cuisine.
Is that why the Chinese will eat anything with four legs, except tables? And anything that flies, except airplanes? I don't think you know much about China. They will eat anything sanitary, because there historically has NOT been a sufficient and consistent food supply.
Yes, this leads to a culture of delicious culinary experimentation. I have done some pretty adventurous eating (several live bug eating contests, for example). I can't say that bugs are "good" or "bad", though the exoskeletons get stuck in your teeth. Cockroaches taste how feces smells. I would not want to have to figure out how to make a cockroach taste good. Luckily, the Chinese already did, hundreds of years ago, because of famine.
Re:It changed our relationships with animals as we (Score:3, Interesting)
But someone who has never owned a parrot? If he walked to a person and bopped his head sideways, I am 100% sure that 99% of the people would have no clue that it means that his neck itches. In fact, I'm pretty sure they couldn't even tell if he is tired, scared or in a bad mood. In all of those most people would think "He flies around and screams. He probably isn't happy?" and couldn't interpret anything more.
Yeah; that was basically what I was saying, though I said it the other way 'round. The writer I was talking about was saying that birds are totally alien to us; I was replying with the biologists' comments about humans having been modified by our domestic critters to have this "empathy" thing that enables us to learn to understand species (animals and plants) that are radically different from us. So, since I've lived with birds for decades, I find them very easy to understand. But I've never lived with horses, so when when my horse-owning friends tell me how communicative they are, I don't see it. I can easily believe it's there, though, from the close coordination you often see between a horse and rider. This fits right in with what the biologists have been saying about us: We aren't born with an instinctive understanding of other creatures, but we (or at least some of us) do have an ability to pick up on other animals' behavior and eventually come to an understanding of what they're communicating.
Another funny anecdote that bird owners can appreciate: While walking with a bunch of co-workers to lunch a couple of years back, one of them made a comment about some birds fighting. I looked where he was looking, and at first didn't see any birds fighting. Then I realized what he was seeing. It was a pair of pigeons, an adult and a juvenile. The juvenile was demanding food from the adult, and the adult was trying to wean the youngster by refusing it the food. To the other guy, it looked like they were fighting. To a person who has watched parent birds raise their babies, it was obvious at a glance what was really going on. That particular behavior isn't much like any human behavior, especially since we don't feed our young by regurgitating food from our crops. But once you've seen it a few times, it's easy to recognize a baby bird saying "Feed me!" while the parent is in effect saying "You're old enough to get your own food, you spoiled brat!"
I'd also agree with that parrot preening invitation. I know exactly the motion you mean, but I expect that it would be meaningless to someone not familiar with parrots. Similarly, I have a friend who has several pet geckos. She likes to tell people how friendly and communicative they are. I can tell that they really like her and they interact a lot, but I don't see the communication. I suppose after a few months around one, I'd start to pick up on their language.
But this has wandered a distance off the topic of why we cook our food. It has led to a few funny scenes in our house. I have several photos of our male cockatiel reaching across a plate to grab chunks of a steak. So much for them being strictly seed eaters. I have this mental image of a flock of several hundred cockatiels descending on a cow and tearing it to pieces. But I suppose not; it would be too tough for them unless it's cooked. The little guy also loves cheeseburgers, especially the cheese and meat, though he likes blood-and-fat-soaked bread, too. I doubt if his wild ancestors ever had such a diet.
Re:Cuisine indicates wealth of past cultures. (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, it's a *standardized* item, made (pretty much) exactly the same way every time, at least in theory, and furthermore people who say otherwise (who say, for instance, that you don't know exactly what it's going to be like on any given occasion) generally do so because they are *criticizing* McDonald's, not praising them. You could probably write a book on what this says about American culture, but the basic jist of it would boil down to the fact that we value consistency and predictability. (This bears out if you look at our entertainment.)
Another thing about the Big Mac is that it's a commercial product brought to you by a multi-billion-dollar international corporation (or franchise licensees of said corporation).
But perhaps the most significant thing that the Big Mac says about American culture is that we really value convenience. Not only do we like to eat at restaurants (paying more money for inferior food rather than taking the time to cook), but furthermore we'll buy a prefab burger assembled by teenagers who make minimum wage if it means we don't have to get out of the car because they've got a drive-through. And we convince ourselves that we *like* it. That's how much we don't want to bother doing simple household domestic tasks (setting the table, cooking, washing dishes) on a day-to-day basis.
However, I probably would have said that the quintessential item in American cuisine is the casserole.
Re:Cuisine indicates wealth of past cultures. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It changed our relationships with animals as we (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm guessing you mean the boas when you say "not a threat to life". My friend did say that she had to learn how to feed them right to keep them friendly and docile. It turned out to be about two mice per week. And she also said she'd had an earlier snake that she fed too well, so it grew to be too big for her to handle or wear as jewelry. She donated it to a local zoo, where it was still living the last I heard, and got a new baby boa.
I've read that most of the "show" cobras are defanged. The story I read about the house cobras somewhere in India made the point that they weren't defanged, because they were there primarily for rodent control. The writer also said that the cobras and humans really didn't interact much. Nobody picks up a cobra and cuddles it. The cobras are almost entirely nocturnal, and sleep in their nest until the humans turn the lights (and/or fires) out. If people get up at night for some reason, the cobras just quietly slither out of the way. The writer also mentioned being a bit worried the couple of times that people picked up a cobra and moved it somewhere. Nothing happened, though, presumably because the cobra was accustomed to humans being about. To its little brain, humans are harmless and too big to eat, so we're just ignored as part of the scenery.
I also remember being a little dubious about there never being interactions with children. But the story really didn't say that much on the topic, other than that the locals didn't think there was a problem. This was contrasted with their very similar disbelief that the Europeans huge dogs weren't a danger to children. Of course, we know that some of them are, but that behavior has mostly been bred out of our dogs by the custom that a dog who harms a child simply dies. I wouldn't be surprised if these cobras were really semi-domesticated over the centuries, and made harmless by the same draconian rule.
The usual term for this sort of relationship is "feral", rather than "domesticated". I lived in Florida for a few years, and a lot of people there like the little lizards that are everywhere. They might not have liked them at first, but after seeing a few of them carrying of a cockroach for a meal, you're likely to decide that the little critters are really cute. But they're not pets; they just live in your house and eat your roaches (and keep out of your way).
I also did a small amount of googling, and found references to a few other cases in India where people (mostly rich people) have pet cobras that they like show to visitors, but they're all defanged. They probably get fed dead mice from pet stores, as my friend's boa did. Mice are cheap, and you can get them from pet stores nearly anywhere.
It is interesting that humans seem to like dangerous pets. In our case, in addition to our cockatiels (mostly harmless), we have a blue-crowned conure, and she has a seriously dangerous beak. We've seen her crack open cherry pits. (Try that with your teeth. ;-) She could crack a finger bone as easily. It took us about a month before we weren't nervous of her beak. Now we understand her, and we don't consider her dangerous. She is a cute, cuddly little creature who likes to play. But when visitors stick out their hands towards her and she makes a threat face, we warn them off. She's afraid of strangers, and she could hurt them if they don't know how to handle her. I'd estimate that she's about as dangerous as the average house cat or a medium-size dog. After all, they are predators with a mouthful of sharp teeth and some dangerous claws. She has one big, strong beak that she keeps honed to a needle point, plus 8 claws that are roughly comparable to cat or dog claws. Just the sort of critter that we humans like to keep as cute house pets. ;-)