Cooking has been a human thing for millions of years

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A lot of that 'improved health' (while they were alive, anyway) is due to a combination of caloric restriction and huge amounts of exercise. Humans today who eat sparingly and spend the entire day walking, running, or otherwise working to procure or prepare food, are going to be pretty healthy as compared to the average modern human, even if all other things are set equal.

Personally, I like my novels, my Hulu, and my WP; I'm grateful for my dentist and for the hospital I work at. I enjoy walking my dog and training at the dojo, but I'm glad that my life and the lives of my family members don't depend on me going out all day, every day, rain or shine or sleet or driving snow, to dig in the ground or to find something to kill.

Wundabar LKL I agree.

Richard Wrangham's theory about the early history of cooking is highly controversial. Most anthropologists disagree that hominids prior to Homo erectus used fire and cooked tubers and roots.

And the person who wrote this blog article clearly had no idea what he was writing about (I always cringe when I read the word "caveman"). Wrangham never argued that early hominids cooked all of their food. He speculated that they added otherwise indigestible or even poisonous tubers to their diet by cooking them. Humans have never needed to cook fruits, nuts, seeds, and most vegetables, and even meat and fish are eaten raw in many cultures.

Last edited by CrazyCatLord on 07 Apr 2012, 2:51 am, edited 1 time in total.

Cooking is fun to do I don't much care for the history of cooking I see no importance in it at all.

"Mettbrötchen" is very popular in Germany Raw minced pork on a bun, with fresh onions. Yummy.

Isn't funny how they say cooking lead to evolution and development of the human mind and yet the same cooked food they say isn't the healthiest choice for consumption.

I like to cook steak mostly hmm that sounds real good wish I had some steak to cook.

Both raw and cooked food comes with different health risks and benefits. Cooked food is generally easier to digest and allows us to better utilize macronutrients like starch and protein. Micronutrients, such as vitamins, might be destroyed by cooking though. And what's worse: You know those carcinogenic hydrocarbons that make tobacco smoke so dangerous? It's a little known fact that all organic matter produces such carcinogens when burned or strongly heated. Which means that all cooked food is carcinogenic.

We've "learned" to reduce our cancer risk by seasoning cooked food with antioxidant-rich herbs, but raw food is nonetheless healthier. Unless we are talking about meat, which poses a greater infection risk when eaten raw. But we've learned to deal with that too, by adding natural antibiotics and anthelmintics such as pepper and garlic.

Bottom line: In times before fridges and meat inspectors, back when humans often had to go without food for days or weeks and needed as many calories as they could get, it made a lot of sense to cook food. Nowadays, it only makes sense for meat, as well as vegetables that are otherwise difficult to digest, such as potatoes. Most vegetables are better eaten raw.

Because other animal species lack a complex language. Other great apes are known to use tools and pass this practice on to their offspring, but they can't communicate complex thoughts and ideas. What's even more important than language is written information. Our cultural and technological evolution went into overdrive as soon as we started writing things down for posterity.

Animals comunicate with each other just fine its not complex but it makes sense to them.

I'm not saying that they can't communicate at all, only that they can't exchange complex new ideas. Individual chimpanzees, for example, might have profound insights and make astonishing discoveries during their lifetime, but their communication is limited to a small range of signals and messages that are vital for their social interactions.

They can't communicate something like "I've found this really sharp stone and cut my finger on it. I wonder if we could use that for something?" To which another chimp might reply "hey, that gives me an idea. What if we put such a sharp stone on a stick and poke it at leopards?" And yet another chimp might chime in with "we could also use it to hunt colobus monkeys!" Human ingenuity is the result of this kind of highly complex and versatile information exchange, which other extant animals don't appear to be capable of.

We are most certainly meant to eat meat. The energy gained from meat far exceeds that of eating plants and the one thing an evolving brain needs is energy.

Raw meat isn't dangerous to consume unless the animal is diseased though. Its simply is harder to digest as the stomach has to use up a lot more energy to break down the protein and digest it. Cooking meat literally does most of that breaking down for you and thus you can not only spend less energy and gain more energy out of it but you also have the advantage of making it easier to chew, swallow and later on, eject from the body.

Go eat sashimi as your only food for a week and you will see how lean your body feels (digestion-wise)... then switch to one week of eating the same amount of fish but cooked (just a little salt and pepper, no oil or anything) and you'll see that the cooked fish is not as filling as the raw one. Thats because your stomach is too busy digesting the raw fish to ask for more.

Good for a diet of losing weight but if you're a little ape-thing trying to evolve you really want the cooked fish so you can eat more of it, spend less energy digesting and gain more energy out of it.

One of the lines of evidence that we have evolved eating meat for a long time is also one of the reasons for cooking our meat: there are a couple of species of tapeworm which can develop to adults in the human gut, and tapeworms are fairly host-specific as a species. In other words, we have been eating raw fish and raw pork for long enough that parasites have adapted to those particular habits of ours. The larvae of tapeworms encyst in the tissues of fish and pigs, and develop to full form in our guts when we eat raw flesh. If we cook it, the larvae are killed.

Wrt. social learning: a study came out recently (heard about it in the Science Friday podcast, but couldn't find it after a very brief google search) about social learning in human children, chimpanzees, and iIrc a small monkey (can't recall the species at the moment). The test involved puzzles with multiple levels, each level resulting in a treat; without prompting, the human children all asked and showed each other what they found, and all of the human children solved their puzzles to the 3rd level, but neither of the other species of primate activly showed others their successes or actively sought help with their puzzles.