Interesting Theory: Why Fire Makes Us Human
 

Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is

• By Jerry Adler
• Smithsonian magazine, June 2013

Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain.


http://www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc...volution-1.jpg

This is literally part of the premise of Michael Pollan's new book. What a rip off of an article.

I read about an experiment recently that showed cooked food required fewer calories to digest than raw food, thus it became more efficient to cook food and eat it when food was scarce. It was done in the context of discovering why people like to cook food, and the evolutionary trait was discovered.

"Unsurprisingly, Wrangham’s theory appeals to people in the food world. “I’m persuaded by it,” says Michael Pollan, author of Cooked, whose opening chapter is set in the sweltering, greasy cookhouse of a whole-hog barbecue joint in North Carolina, which he sets in counterpoint to lunch with Wrangham at the Harvard Faculty Club, where they each ate a salad. “Claude Lévi-Strauss, Brillat-Savarin treated cooking as a metaphor for culture,” Pollan muses, “but if Wrangham is right, it’s not a metaphor, it’s a precondition.” (Read about what it's like to have dinner with Pollan)"

Ready...Fire...Aim

LMAO

We ate meat to get smarter...which means vegetarians are some dumb mother ****ers.

Check this out, from the article:

"Which is, in a way, his point: Human beings evolved to eat cooked food. It is literally possible to starve to death even while filling one’s stomach with raw food. In the wild, people typically survive only a few months without cooking, even if they can obtain meat. Wrangham cites evidence that urban raw-foodists, despite year-round access to bananas, nuts and other high-quality agricultural products, as well as juicers, blenders and dehydrators, are often underweight. Of course, they may consider this desirable, but Wrangham considers it alarming that in one study half the women were malnourished to the point they stopped menstruating. They presumably are eating all they want, and may even be consuming what appears to be an adequate number of calories, based on standard USDA tables."

I don't see how someone could could starve to death while eating the recommended 2000 calories a day. This is very interesting if its true, but it seems to go against everything I have been taught about nutrition.

Yeah it surprised me too. From the article:

"Carmody explains that only a fraction of the calories in raw starch and protein are absorbed by the body directly via the small intestine. The remainder passes into the large bowel, where it is broken down by that organ’s ravenous population of microbes, which consume the lion’s share for themselves. Cooked food, by contrast, is mostly digested by the time it enters the colon; for the same amount of calories ingested, the body gets roughly 30 percent more energy from cooked oat, wheat or potato starch as compared to raw, and as much as 78 percent from the protein in an egg. In Carmody’s experiments, animals given cooked food gain more weight than animals fed the same amount of raw food. And once they’ve been fed on cooked food, mice, at least, seemed to prefer it."

What's a vegetable.

Frankenstein hated humans. Fire bad!

no barbeque, no civilization,
if I can't grill and drink beer on the weekends, what use is the rest of it

I'd be interested in seeing the scientific explanation connection between sporting a goatee and the having the ability to smoke meats. I can't explain it, but it's 1:1.

I read an article once that talked about how cooked food takes less jaw power to chew and thus we had more room in our head for the brain to develop. Less bone and muscle needed.

Fire doesn't make us "human" being born "human" makes us "human". AmIright? :)

Fire doesn't make us "human".

The ability to create fire where fire doesn't exist is what separates humans from every species inhabiting this planet.

The ability to create air conditioning is very important, also.

Cool theory bro :D

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Ya gotta be a human to make and use one of these.

Another article related to prehistoric cooking:

Food residue encrusted on 6,000-year-old pottery fragments from Northern Europe, such as the one above, show traces of mustard seed, which was likely used as a seasoning for fish and meat. Image via Hayley Saul


http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/scie...08/pottery.jpg

As the inane car insurance commercials suggest, ancient humans were smarter than we give them credit for. They created some of the same words we still use today. They even brewed beer.

Now evidence suggests that they had some culinary flair as well. A new analysis of food residue encrusted on millennia-old pottery shards collected from sites in Germany and Denmark shows that prehistoric humans used the spice mustard seed to season the plant and animal staples that made up the bulk of their diet.

As part of the new study, published today in PLOS ONE, researchers from the UK’s University of York and elsewhere chemically analyzed the residue on ancient pieces of pottery that are part of the collections of a trio of museums—the Kalunborg and Holbæk Museums, in Denmark, along with the Schleswig-Holstein Museum in Germany. The artifacts were originally excavated from three different sites in the same two countries which are between 5,750 and 6,100 years old, an era during which people in the area were in the midst of transitioning from hunter-gatherer to nomadic societies.

When analyzing the food gunk encrusted on the pottery, the team looked specifically at phytoliths, microscopic granules of silica that plants produce and store in their cells after absorbing silicic acid from the soil. Different plants produce slightly different types of phytoliths, so by closely examining them, the scientists were able to figure out which sorts of plants had been cooked in the pottery.

They found that the residue from the insides of the pots had much larger quantities of phytoliths than the outsides, confirming that the granules were indicative of cooking use. When they compared the size and shape of the phytoliths to databases of hundreds of modern plant phytoliths, they most closely matched that of mustard seed. The team also found oil residue from both land animals and marine life, and other plant residues that come from starchier plants—suggesting that these prehistoric people were cooking fish, meat and plants in the pots and seasoning them with the mustard seed.

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/scie...ed-spices-too/

Abstract

Here we present evidence of phytoliths preserved in carbonised food deposits on prehistoric pottery from the western Baltic dating from 6,100 cal BP to 5750 cal BP. Based on comparisons to over 120 European and Asian species, our observations are consistent with phytolith morphologies observed in modern garlic mustard seed (Alliaria petiolata (M. Bieb) Cavara & Grande). As this seed has a strong flavour, little nutritional value, and the phytoliths are found in pots along with terrestrial and marine animal residues, these findings are the first direct evidence for the spicing of food in European prehistoric cuisine. Our evidence suggests a much greater antiquity to the spicing of foods than is evident from the macrofossil record, and challenges the view that plants were exploited by hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists solely for energy requirements, rather than taste.


http://www.plosone.org/article/info%...l.pone.0070583

Ya gotta be alien to try to figure out what you just posted.

He was trying to post a lighter, so here's one:

http://blog.doyouremember.com/wp-con...eesecake-4.jpg

In evolutionary terms cooking food has several advantages. Easier to chew and digest, cooked food gets rid of parasites and harmful bacteria, cooked food actually helps the body absorb nutrients: studies show that more lycopene is absorbed from cooked food then raw.

So a human that cooked food would be healthier and less parasite free then one who doesn't.

I honestly believe fire has a primeval, hypnotic effect on people, its bred into our genes to admire and be fascinated by fire... no lie, there are honestly veeery few things i love more than to sit outdoors somewhere around a fire, theres just something so timeless about it.

Several years ago, i coined the term "caveman tv", and that's exactly what it is... staring deep into a fire lost in your own thoughts is the single best therapy ever created.

how many years do we have to keep feeding our dogs cooked dog food till they become self-aware

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/tjPwZIZ0R5k" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

this poor vegan locked himself in a room and the cat eventually ate him
http://data.whicdn.com/images/454198..._cat_large.jpg

Oh no . fireFlys got us on that one.