IN 2009 Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist at Harvard, published an intriguing thesis. He was trying to answer a question that had long puzzled workers in his field: how was it possible for an organ as energetically expensive to sustain as the human brain to evolve?
Before Dr Wrangham’s work the conventional answer was: “meat-eating”. Archaeological evidence such as lack of tool marks on animal bones suggests humanity’s ancestors, the Australopithecines, were largely vegetarian. By contrast Homo erectus, the first widespread human being (pictured below), also ate meat, which is a more compact source of calories than most plant matter, and might thus have provided the extra brain-food needed.
Dr Wrangham, however, had a different answer: “cooking”. He showed that the ease of digestion and additional nutritional value made available by treating food with fire (which alters starch and protein molecules in ways that make them easier to digest) boosts its calorific value enough for a reasonable daily intake to power both brain and body—so much so that modern humans who attempt to live only on raw foodstuffs (there are...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1R7OgJc
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