Cooking has been a human thing for millions of years

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Vexcalibur
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naturalplastic
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06 Apr 2012, 9:06 am

Cooking, and spoken language, are both "species universal", and "species specific".

Have long thought that there was connection between the two in evolution.

As our ancestors learned to master fire, and then learned to cook food they lost the need to rip raw food with their teeth, so their faces gradually got shorter. Their tongues could hit their teeth with more dexterity and subtley producing greater varieties of controlled sound. And the culinary and the linguistic both coevolved. Both traits enabled humans to invade new ecosystems and spread over the planet.

The author of the article is kicking - not a dead horse- but a stillborn colt.

Ive never heard of anyone, either scientist or non scientists, suggest that "cavemen" ate raw food. Obviously cooking had to have been invented at some point but its been long accepted that it was long before the appearance of either Cro Magon men, or Neanderthals, and was probabaly invented back in homo erectus times. So cooking was already basic for a long stretch of the "caveman" era.



Last edited by naturalplastic on 06 Apr 2012, 11:53 am, edited 1 time in total.

YippySkippy
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06 Apr 2012, 9:18 am

The fact that raw meat is dangerous to humans suggests that perhaps we AREN'T meant to eat it, biologically.
Meat in general, I mean - not just raw meat.



naturalplastic
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06 Apr 2012, 9:58 am

YippySkippy wrote:
The fact that raw meat is dangerous to humans suggests that perhaps we AREN'T meant to eat it, biologically.
Meat in general, I mean - not just raw meat.


I think we should return to the "other white meat".

Insects!

We cant go back to "fishing for termites" like our chimplike ancestors, but we can put termites into enclosed steel rooms- feed them scrap wood and fatten em up- and then grind them up into Mrs. paul's fish sticks and sell them at giant as a cheap source of protien.



01001011
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06 Apr 2012, 10:17 am

These caveman arguments are just laughable. Don't forget early humans suffer from all kinds of treatable / avoidable diseases and have a much shorter lifespan than us.



TallyMan
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06 Apr 2012, 10:31 am

YippySkippy wrote:
The fact that raw meat is dangerous to humans suggests that perhaps we AREN'T meant to eat it, biologically.
Meat in general, I mean - not just raw meat.


Raw meat is commonly eaten in Germany. If in France don't ask for a steak tartar then - raw egg on top of a raw burger! Even normal steaks here are usually served on the very rare side - they still moo on the plate! :P


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Robdemanc
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06 Apr 2012, 10:42 am

It must have gone hand in hand with the control of fire for us to eat meat and I reckon it goes back millions of years and helped our brains become more sophisticated. Stone tools are millions of years old and they must have been used to cut meat from animals.



ValentineWiggin
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06 Apr 2012, 10:59 am

Oh lawd!

"Humanity isn't static—you can't just be okay with all development up until the invention of the sarong, and then declare all post-sarong technology to be "unnatural." Sure, cavemen didn't have shoes. Until they invented f*****g shoes! (You know what else they didn't have? Discarded hypodermic needles. Broken glass. Used condoms.) They also didn't have antibiotics, refrigeration, written languages, wheels, patchouli, the internet, and NOT LIVING IN A ROCK WITH A HOLE IN IT. But I don't see anyone giving any of that up in the name of "health." Hey, why not install a live gibbon in your fridge so you have to fight it to get to your bison jerky? Just like nature!"


ROFL- almost.


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b9
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06 Apr 2012, 1:05 pm

i am not interested in the debate about current diets, but i was surprised to find it plausible (upon consideration) that human descendants cooked food 1 million years ago.

i never really considered the matter, but upon consideration, i think that when people became smart enough to make stone tools (more than 1 million years ago) their brains were efficient enough to make abstract connections and "predict the future" by making tools for future use.

a crow uses rough tools by fashioning sticks in a way to tease grubs out of holes in wood, but it would probably not consider making that tool until the circumstance arose that they needed it. as well, the crow would not keep the tool for use in the future, because it's mind would not abstractly connect the facts that "tomorrow they would need a similar tool" with "they already have one in their possession today", so to sit down and make a tool whilst not in the act of hunting or hewing or whatever the reason they may need it requires an amount of abstract intelligence.

i consider that the likely sequence of events that led to cooking would have been that early hominids would have known that after naturally occurring fires, the land that the fire ravaged would be richer with freshly dead animals that they can just pick up and take home without the need to hunt them. many animals are drawn to freshly burnt out areas for the same reason.

they would have probably preferred the taste of animals killed by fire due to the increased tenderness and the caramelizing effect that the fires would bestow on the carcases.

they may have noted that the flesh closest to the surface of the animals body was the tastiest, and that deeper in, the meat would be raw and less tasty and less easy to eat. small animals may have been completely cooked and thus entirely tasty and tender, and so the abstraction they were capable of drawing would be that fire makes meat tasty and easy to chew.

i would think that their capacity to start fires may have come much later, and i think that they would have seen that fire that touched unburned combustible material set that material alight, and so if they were in a situation where they saw a fire, they may have kindled a branch or something from it and taken it home where they kept it propagated by the use of previously collected wood.

i imagine that there may have been a role in the tribe for a person who's duty it was to ensure that the camp fire never went out, and that it would have been one of the most important jobs back then.

i imagine that if the camp fire went out, then it may have been a long time before they had the opportunity to rekindle it.

i think that the level of intelligence necessary to deduce how to to start a fire would maybe have taken hundreds of thousands of years from the point where they discovered how to utilize it.

i would suspect that the fashioning of stone axes and spears from flint yielded sparks, and some bright person reasoned that lightning was like a giant spark, and those giant sparks started the fires they relied on to ignite their "torches" that they then took home to light their fires that they preserved.

i would think that that person also had observed the ease with which various materials were set ablaze by watching fires in progress, and that sparse dry grasses caught alight much more rapidly than tree trunks, and so would use the most appropriate materials to experiment with while striking a spark into them.

whatever. i really could not care. i want my fractal animation to finish rendering and i am tired.



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06 Apr 2012, 2:59 pm

Isn't it strange that humans seem to be the only animals that advance their knowledge of the world and change their way of living from one generation to another? How come other animals don't seem to be making any progress? We could use some help.



AceOfSpades
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06 Apr 2012, 3:06 pm

I never understood the appeal of maintaining some state of nature when nature inherently demands adaptation.



WilliamWDelaney
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06 Apr 2012, 4:21 pm

YippySkippy wrote:
The fact that raw meat is dangerous to humans suggests that perhaps we AREN'T meant to eat it, biologically.
Meat in general, I mean - not just raw meat.
No. For one thing, this is vegan wishful thinking, and it's kind of pathetic.

The fact of the matter is that our digestive systems are best suited, if limited to raw meat, for small game that has relatively accessible meat. The acuity of our vision is otherwise inexplicable and absolutely superfluous. There is no such thing as a grazing animal that requires 20/20 vision for its survival.

However, one of the dumbest vanities of most thinkers on this subject is associating tool use and the use of fire automatically with modernity. Rather than being a true step toward civilization, it's really no more like modern tool use than hoarding of nuts by a squirrel, and making anything else of it is just stupid. The only relation it has with tool use is the demands for dexterity and tactile discrimination that would be required for it in practice. It really doesn't take much intelligence to figure out that oversized game is easier to eat after you've burned it for a while.

Another absolutely stupid vanity by many thinkers is the idea that our primitive ancestors conceived of their actions as if they were planning a work of engineering. Sorry to burst anyone's bubble there, but our primitive ancestors were not working from the idea that they could feed more people with a larger animal, but it just made them feel more impressed with themselves. Feel-good sensations motivates just about everything that human beings do, really. Relatively little of our behavior involves higher-level thought processes.

Finally, human intervention does not automatically equate to an intrusion upon the course of nature. On the contrary, Australia's flora is actually naturally adapted to fire-setting by the native aborigines. Eucalyptus and countless other varieties of plant require fire for the germination of new growth. Although fires not set by humans and their now-extinct relatives might also be a factor, fire-setting by aborigines is actually a positive and mutualistic adaptation. If this system had gone on for long enough, taking humans out of the equation could have been damaging to the environment.

The point is, nature is opportunistic and malleable, and it always has been. Anything else is...unnatural.



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06 Apr 2012, 5:34 pm

01001011 wrote:
These caveman arguments are just laughable. Don't forget early humans suffer from all kinds of treatable / avoidable diseases and have a much shorter lifespan than us.


Early humans didn't suffer from all kinds of treatable/avoidable diseases. The bones found are in much better shape healthwise than those of many (most?) modern humans. They didn't have arthritis or diabetes or cancer or any of the other numerous "diseases of civilization" that we (collectively) suffer from. What is often found in those otherwise healthy bones is trauma signs- fractures, crush injuries. People died from injuries that any current emergency ward can save a person from. Thus the shorter life span. But they died in a disease-free state compared to us.



naturalplastic
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06 Apr 2012, 5:55 pm

Janissy wrote:
01001011 wrote:
These caveman arguments are just laughable. Don't forget early humans suffer from all kinds of treatable / avoidable diseases and have a much shorter lifespan than us.


Early humans didn't suffer from all kinds of treatable/avoidable diseases. The bones found are in much better shape healthwise than those of many (most?) modern humans. They didn't have arthritis or diabetes or cancer or any of the other numerous "diseases of civilization" that we (collectively) suffer from. What is often found in those otherwise healthy bones is trauma signs- fractures, crush injuries. People died from injuries that any current emergency ward can save a person from. Thus the shorter life span. But they died in a disease-free state compared to us.


Exactly.

Most of the 'treatable diseases" ( ie infectious disesses) didnt plague us until the several thousand year period AFTER we left the caves but before we invented modern plumbing and modern sewer systems only a couple centuries ago.



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06 Apr 2012, 9:46 pm

:D I enjoy eating meat and red meat yumm that is all I will say



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06 Apr 2012, 10:13 pm

So we shouldn't eat cooked meat because we are not designed to eat cooked meat?

Why stop there? We are designed to die young! Let's reduce the human lifespan! It's natural, you see.

Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure that we aren't even designed to use language.

If it is really better to eat raw meat than to eat cooked meat, then there will be evidence for it which has nothing to do with "design". I want to see correlations with health statistics.