Did Cooking Make Us Human?

by Jennifer Lawinski, Posted Mar 3rd 2010 @ 4:00PM

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Toss a steak on the grill and you may be reenacting an event that helped separate men from apes thousands of years ago.

Cooking, according to a new theory from a Harvard anthropologist, was a key turning point in human evolution, and without it, we would still spend significant chunks of our day chewing heaps of raw foods, BBC News reported.

Humans would need to eat more than 10 pounds of fruits and vegetables a day -- a task which would require six hours of chewing, Harvard Professor Richard Wrangham told BBC News. Cooking, he said, allowed humans to begin eating meat.

"I think cooking is arguably the biggest increase in the quality of the diet in the whole of the history of life," he said.

"Our ancestors most probably dropped food in fire accidentally. They would have found it was delicious and that set us off on a whole new direction," he told BBC News.

When Homo erectus, the first truly "human" of our ancestors, evolved 1.8 million years ago, they had bigger brains and teeth than older species, along with the ability to walk upright and run.

Homo erectus also had smaller guts.

"Cooking made our guts smaller," Wrangham told BBC News. "Once we cooked our food, we didn't need big guts. They're costly in terms of energy. Individuals that were born with small guts were able to save energy, have more babies and survive better."

Cooking also allowed humans to spend more energy on thinking than on digestion, Professor Peter Wheeler from Liverpool John Moores University told BBC News.

Filed Under: Science
Tags: evolution, food theories

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

3-03-2010 @4:09PM gobo said... Humans need 10 lbs of raw fruits & vegetables a day? Y'know, I know people who eat raw food all the time, and I guarantee they don't eat 10 lbs per day, or spend six hours a day chewing.
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3-03-2010 @4:13PM Jackie said... I doubt the raw vegans of the world (and there are plenty) spend 6 hours a day chewing. The entire study seems off if you ask me.
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3-03-2010 @4:38PM John said... The 10 pounds and 6 hours part comes from low density food totally unprocessed food. Try eating raw wheat berries, raw tomatoes, bananas with the peel, apples skin, core, stem seeds. Eat everything. Think about how the "food" would be when gathered directly from the plant and not from a store.

Check out this book for other details:
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

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3-03-2010 @6:12PM Damon said... Very off study if you ask me as well. I do eat a very unprocessed raw food diet. I assure you folks that it does not involve greater quantities of food nor excruciating sessions of chewing like a four legged herbivore. Interesting, the very first thing that I was able to detect after changing to a high-raw diet was an INCREASE of energy, not a decrease as raw living foods contain hormones and enzymes that break the food down for you. This leaves the excess energy for you to use as you please; not for digesting cooked or processed foods. I would think we would have had a smaller gut due to the general lack of food availability not to mention most foods are much more nutrient dense as they are found in nature. Today the human gut seems to be swelling to me?
If you like, go to blog.wewantraw.com to see how raw foods are very diverse; more than just salads and smoothies.
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3-03-2010 @7:56PM Daniel F. said... I think the ten pounds/six hours may be referring to prehistoric proto-humans yet to evolve to our present level of physical and metabolic efficiency, other wise the claim doesn't make much sense.
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3-03-2010 @10:26PM Eugene Kan said... If anything, it was hunting and eating animal flesh/organs that enabled us to evolve into our current state.

While the "Expensive Tissue Hypothesis" (Google it) doesn't explicitly say high-fat diets from animals contributed to larger brains and smaller guts, it mentions calorfically dense foods which is largely provided by fats.

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3-04-2010 @8:12AM LinC said... Remember, early humans were not farmers. They didn't save and plant seeds, and they could only find fruits and vegetables during the right season and weather. They were nomadic so they had limited means to preserve and carry food with them. As a result they ate a lot of stuff we wouldn't consider edible (roots, grass) in attempt to sustain themselves until the next mammoth kill, when they would gorge on meat and fats. Many of those sustainment foods had very little nutritional value so they had to eat a lot of volume to keep fueled.

Personally I think the "raw foods" business is bad science. We cook our foods to get more nutrition from them. Breaking down those cell walls with heat is what started us on the path to civilization.

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3-04-2010 @4:59PM Aaron said... Every vegan I know goes out of their way to include foods dense in
protein in their diet. Even raw foodies don't just eat savannah
forage. That's where the 10lbs number comes from, the amount of wild
forage it takes to thrive.
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