Why Do We Cook?

Your brain is hungry. Here’s how to feed it.

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Ever wonder why we cook our food? We do it because it tastes good, of course, and because our customs and traditions are built around it. But we also cook our food for some basic biological reasons, because of evolution. Some scientists think that figuring out how to cook actually MADE us human!

If conversation gets a little dry around your holiday table, now you’ll have some awesome science to share with everyone!

Richard Wrangham – “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human” http://amzn.to/1cg5flN

“The Raw and the Stolen” (PDF) – Richard Wrangham et al. http://bit.ly/JTLYfe
(that one has some of the counterarguments, too)
Greg Laden’s summary: http://bit.ly/1dx46oc

Cooked Foods Needed for Early Human Brain: http://bit.ly/1l8bqJE

Man Entered the Kitchen 1.9 Million Years Ago: http://bit.ly/1c1vcB5

What made us human: http://bit.ly/19lp4cU and http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP08340342.pdf

The story might not be quite so simple, though: http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2010/10/28/food-for-thought-cooking-in-human-evolution/

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The ability to make and use fire has fundamentally changed the arc of our evolution. The bodies we have today were, in many ways, shaped by that time when we first tamed fire.

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References:
http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-erectus
http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-heidelbergensis
Alperson-Afil, N. (2008). Continual fire-making by hominins at Gesher Benot Ya ‘aqov, Israel. Quaternary Science Reviews, 27(17-18), 1733-1739.
Barkai, R., Rosell, J., Blasco, R., & Gopher, A. (2017). Fire for a reason: Barbecue at middle Pleistocene Qesem cave, Israel. Current Anthropology, 58(S16), S314-S328.
Berna, F., Goldberg, P., Horwitz, L. K., Brink, J., Holt, S., Bamford, M., & Chazan, M. (2012). Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(20), E1215-E1220.
Blain, H. A., Agustí, J., Lordkipanidze, D., Rook, L., & Delfino, M. (2014). Paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental context of the Early Pleistocene hominins from Dmanisi (Georgia, Lesser Caucasus) inferred from the herpetofaunal assemblage. Quaternary science reviews, 105, 136-150.
Carmody, R. N., & Wrangham, R. W. (2009). The energetic significance of cooking. Journal of Human Evolution, 57(4), 379-391.
Clark, J. D., & Harris, J. W. (1985). Fire and its roles in early hominid lifeways. African Archaeological Review, 3(1), 3-27.
Gowlett, J. A. (2016). The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1696), 20150164.
Gowlett, J. A., & Wrangham, R. W. (2013). Earliest fire in Africa: towards the convergence of archaeological evidence and the cooking hypothesis. Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, 48(1), 5-30.
Hlubik, S., Berna, F., Feibel, C., Braun, D., & Harris, J. W. (2017). Researching the nature of fire at 1.5 Mya on the site of FxJj20 AB, Koobi Fora, Kenya, using high-resolution spatial analysis and FTIR spectrometry. Current Anthropology, 58(S16), S243-S257.
MacDonald, K. (2017). The use of fire and human distribution. Temperature, 4(2), 153-165.
Pruetz, J. D., & LaDuke, T. C. (2010). Brief communication: Reaction to fire by savanna chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) at Fongoli, Senegal: Conceptualization of “fire behavior” and the case for a chimpanzee model. American Journal of Physical Anthropology: The Official Publication of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, 141(4), 646-650.
Roebroeks, W., & Villa, P. (2011). On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(13), 5209-5214.
Zink, K. D., & Lieberman, D. E. (2016). Impact of meat and Lower Palaeolithic food processing techniques on chewing in humans. Nature, 531(7595), 500.

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