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Cooking food breaks down the cell walls and so makes it much easier to digest. So you can get more of the calories out of the food you consume. You spend less t

Cooking food breaks down the cell walls and so makes it much easier to digest. So you can get more of the calories out of the food you consume. You spend less time gathering and eating and free up time for thinking.

marcus_holmes 9y ago
OK, that makes sense. Thanks :) Interesting that intelligence bootstraps like this. Get smart enough to use fire and that allows you to grow more neurons and get smart enough to make... wheels? Computers? What's the next leap after fire?
- hcarvalhoalves 9y ago
  Fire led to agriculture and metal working, which in turn led to society and war. The rest snowballs from there.
  - hueving 9y ago
    Chimpanzees have war, none of the other stuff is required for that.
    - adrianN 9y ago
      Ants have war too.
      - dom0 9y ago
        Animals don't have the A bomb.
        InitialLastName 9y ago
        Neither did humans, for the first 99.856% of their existence.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    There is no indication that society did not exist before Fire. A lot of apes are social animals and they don't have any fire at all.
- devdoomari 9y ago
  maybe domesticating other animals such as horses, pigs, and cows?
- Retra 9y ago
  Cooking also eliminates a large number of diseases which increases lifespan and health. Next, you'd want cutting tools to separate your food into clothes parts and eating parts. Use bladders for storing water, which (along with clothes) allows for safer travel and bigger hunting/gathering ranges. Cutting tools also help make good weapons. With a larger range and easier hunting, you won't have to be as nomadic to find food, so you can start permanent settlements. Find somewhere where plants will grow with regular flooding. Learn to make clay brick and pots in your fire, and you can now store food, seeds, and water. More time now to figure out how to control the flooding process so you lose less crops and can grow on drier land.
  - marcus_holmes 9y ago
    I was more interested in the physiological changes than the social ones. If fire allows a brain to grow more neurons because cooking, does farming allow yet more neurons? Or animal domestication? Maybe language? That surely changes our brain structure? Did that come before fire? We know that other animals have rudimentary language, so is language a precursor to fire? Is it a prerequisite for fire?
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  This is a field of active research -- the increase in hominin / human cognitive capabilities, particularly as reflected in the anthropological record. Sander van der Leeuw, of the University of Arizona / Santa Fe Institute, is among the researchers looking at this. Part of the process is tracked through the complexity of stone tools, which (he argues) is related to short-term working memory and the number of items that can be maintained there. As to causality: * Fire, cooking, and food preparation: increase food availability, decrease the uncertainty and energy required for food gathering. * Tools, language, and simple structures: cooperative and complex arrangements. Possibly not so much the cause of mental development as a selection filter: those with better brains can work together in more complex societies. * Agriculture, writing, cities: This pretty much sparked like a fire and took off immediately, throughout the Asian-African-European supercontinent, and, somewhat less spectacularly, in parts of the Americas. * More recent developments may not have occurred over a sufficient period of time as to be profoundly evolutionary, though I wouldn't dismiss the thought. Still, the process is clearly cumulative. You might also like to poke around at the History of Information website: http://www.historyofinformation.com/ http://www.historyofinformation.com/ Also David Christian's "Big History" concept: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History
  - marcus_holmes 9y ago
    fascinating, thanks :)
- ajuc 9y ago
  Widespread caesarean section? It would allow brains to grow bigger eliminating the main bottleneck - birth canal. But that's ahead of us.
taneq 9y ago
Pet theory time: There's a lot of speculation about why human females have greatly enlarged breasts compared with other primates. These theories usually revolve around some alleged similarity between boobs and bums, which let's face it, is quite a stretch, especially when you consider other primates. A female chimpanzee's chest looks absolutely nothing like its butt. However, humans do have much larger brains than other primates, and those brains grow very fast immediately after birth. My theory is that after the advent of cooking, human brains were able to increase in size thanks to the increased dietary energy density of our new diet. Human breasts then had to increase in size in proportion with the nutritional requirements of those infant brains, which had to grow faster than previously.
- chongli 9y ago
  Would be a great pet theory if there were a positive correlation between breast size and milk supply. There isn't. In fact, there's some research to suggest a negative correlation between BMI and breastfeeding quality and duration. [0] [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22481622 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22481622
  - taneq 9y ago
    You seem to be conflating BMI with breast size? While that's true to some extent, you'd have to control for obesity. Breasts are made up of milk glands surrounded by fat, and the varying ratio of milk gland to fat is why overall breast size doesn't correlate well with milk production. My theory still works if initially, female pre-humans with larger milk glands were able to better feed their young and so had higher survival rates, while male pre-humans evolved to prefer larger milk glands. After a point, runaway sexual selection caused breast size to increase independently from the pressure on milk production.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > There's a lot of speculation about why human females have greatly enlarged breasts compared with other primates. These theories usually revolve around some alleged similarity between boobs and bums, That's the distorted popular version. The more common scientific version, AFAICT, is that they evolved in certain other upright primates to resemble swellings in the genital/buttock region of non-upright forbears and provide similar sexual signalling. > Human breasts then had to increase in size in proportion with the nutritional requirements of those infant brains, which had to grow faster than previously. This speculation would make sense if there was a relation between the quantity of fatty tissue which determines breast size and milk production. But, there isn't, so...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ekianjo 9y ago
> You spend less time gathering and eating and free up time for thinking. I think it's the other way around. We got bigger brains in the first place because our ancestors discovered fire and were able to eat cook foods that provide more calories. Therefore they progressively were able to sustain larger and larger brains. A gorilla for example has one of the largest brains for primate and they need to spend most of their days foraging in order to function. A human brain would be impossible to sustain without cooked foods.
- ccozan 9y ago
  Indeed, the brain consumes about 20-25% of the energy and dissipates around 40% of the body heat. ( I swear I need of of those [0], my head - short hair nonetheless - is sweating like hell in the night ) [0] https://www.amazon.com/Mediflow-1006-06-Original-Waterbase-Pillow/dp/B003J372NS/ https://www.amazon.com/Mediflow-1006-06-Original-Waterbase-P...
- mysterypie 9y ago
  > A human brain would be impossible to sustain without cooked foods. How do we explain the survival of people that eat only raw foods even today? Wouldn't that argue against your theory? I suppose we're speaking about a population and that there will be individual exceptions. But even in a population, shouldn't raw food eaters die sooner or be worse off than cooked food eaters on average?
  - CuriouslyC 9y ago
    One problem with that is the fact that people (at least in the west) who choose to eat raw food are usually health conscious and comparably affluent. This biases the sample. Furthermore, the issue is complicated by the effects on adults vs children.
  - steve_adams_86 9y ago
    I guess it could be argued that raw food dieters now have access to rich foods like oils, avocados, sprouted legumes and grains, nuts and seeds, etc. That makes the diet far easier than it would have been even 100 years ago, I think. I'm not in favor or opposed to the person you're responding to. Just thinking about how humans eating a raw diet are different from other animals doing so.
gambiting 9y ago
By following this logic, would Dogs evolve to be more and more intelligent, given that we feed them nothing but a high-calorie diet with zero need for any survival skills? I suspect that high intelligence does not give them any evolutionary advantage and therefore wouldn't become dominant, but then humans do like "smart" dogs and could selectively breed them for intelligence. No?
- marcus_holmes 9y ago
  this seems like something we could test... selective breeding for smarter dogs. Mind you, we'd have to establish a metric for smarter first. Sheepdogs and their ability to control a mob of sheep always seemed to me to be pretty damned smart...

marcus_holmes 9y ago

OK, that makes sense. Thanks :) Interesting that intelligence bootstraps like this. Get smart enough to use fire and that allows you to grow more neurons and get smart enough to make... wheels? Computers? What's the next leap after fire?

hcarvalhoalves 9y ago
Fire led to agriculture and metal working, which in turn led to society and war. The rest snowballs from there.
- hueving 9y ago
  Chimpanzees have war, none of the other stuff is required for that.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Ants have war too.
    - dom0 9y ago
      Animals don't have the A bomb.
      - InitialLastName 9y ago
        Neither did humans, for the first 99.856% of their existence.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  There is no indication that society did not exist before Fire. A lot of apes are social animals and they don't have any fire at all.
devdoomari 9y ago
maybe domesticating other animals such as horses, pigs, and cows?
Retra 9y ago
Cooking also eliminates a large number of diseases which increases lifespan and health. Next, you'd want cutting tools to separate your food into clothes parts and eating parts. Use bladders for storing water, which (along with clothes) allows for safer travel and bigger hunting/gathering ranges. Cutting tools also help make good weapons. With a larger range and easier hunting, you won't have to be as nomadic to find food, so you can start permanent settlements. Find somewhere where plants will grow with regular flooding. Learn to make clay brick and pots in your fire, and you can now store food, seeds, and water. More time now to figure out how to control the flooding process so you lose less crops and can grow on drier land.
- marcus_holmes 9y ago
  I was more interested in the physiological changes than the social ones. If fire allows a brain to grow more neurons because cooking, does farming allow yet more neurons? Or animal domestication? Maybe language? That surely changes our brain structure? Did that come before fire? We know that other animals have rudimentary language, so is language a precursor to fire? Is it a prerequisite for fire?
dredmorbius 9y ago
This is a field of active research -- the increase in hominin / human cognitive capabilities, particularly as reflected in the anthropological record. Sander van der Leeuw, of the University of Arizona / Santa Fe Institute, is among the researchers looking at this. Part of the process is tracked through the complexity of stone tools, which (he argues) is related to short-term working memory and the number of items that can be maintained there. As to causality: * Fire, cooking, and food preparation: increase food availability, decrease the uncertainty and energy required for food gathering. * Tools, language, and simple structures: cooperative and complex arrangements. Possibly not so much the cause of mental development as a selection filter: those with better brains can work together in more complex societies. * Agriculture, writing, cities: This pretty much sparked like a fire and took off immediately, throughout the Asian-African-European supercontinent, and, somewhat less spectacularly, in parts of the Americas. * More recent developments may not have occurred over a sufficient period of time as to be profoundly evolutionary, though I wouldn't dismiss the thought. Still, the process is clearly cumulative. You might also like to poke around at the History of Information website: http://www.historyofinformation.com/ http://www.historyofinformation.com/ Also David Christian's "Big History" concept: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History
- marcus_holmes 9y ago
  fascinating, thanks :)
ajuc 9y ago
Widespread caesarean section? It would allow brains to grow bigger eliminating the main bottleneck - birth canal. But that's ahead of us.

taneq 9y ago

Pet theory time: There's a lot of speculation about why human females have greatly enlarged breasts compared with other primates. These theories usually revolve around some alleged similarity between boobs and bums, which let's face it, is quite a stretch, especially when you consider other primates. A female chimpanzee's chest looks absolutely nothing like its butt. However, humans do have much larger brains than other primates, and those brains grow very fast immediately after birth. My theory is that after the advent of cooking, human brains were able to increase in size thanks to the increased dietary energy density of our new diet. Human breasts then had to increase in size in proportion with the nutritional requirements of those infant brains, which had to grow faster than previously.

chongli 9y ago
Would be a great pet theory if there were a positive correlation between breast size and milk supply. There isn't. In fact, there's some research to suggest a negative correlation between BMI and breastfeeding quality and duration. [0] [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22481622 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22481622
- taneq 9y ago
  You seem to be conflating BMI with breast size? While that's true to some extent, you'd have to control for obesity. Breasts are made up of milk glands surrounded by fat, and the varying ratio of milk gland to fat is why overall breast size doesn't correlate well with milk production. My theory still works if initially, female pre-humans with larger milk glands were able to better feed their young and so had higher survival rates, while male pre-humans evolved to prefer larger milk glands. After a point, runaway sexual selection caused breast size to increase independently from the pressure on milk production.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> There's a lot of speculation about why human females have greatly enlarged breasts compared with other primates. These theories usually revolve around some alleged similarity between boobs and bums, That's the distorted popular version. The more common scientific version, AFAICT, is that they evolved in certain other upright primates to resemble swellings in the genital/buttock region of non-upright forbears and provide similar sexual signalling. > Human breasts then had to increase in size in proportion with the nutritional requirements of those infant brains, which had to grow faster than previously. This speculation would make sense if there was a relation between the quantity of fatty tissue which determines breast size and milk production. But, there isn't, so...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ekianjo 9y ago

> You spend less time gathering and eating and free up time for thinking. I think it's the other way around. We got bigger brains in the first place because our ancestors discovered fire and were able to eat cook foods that provide more calories. Therefore they progressively were able to sustain larger and larger brains. A gorilla for example has one of the largest brains for primate and they need to spend most of their days foraging in order to function. A human brain would be impossible to sustain without cooked foods.

ccozan 9y ago
Indeed, the brain consumes about 20-25% of the energy and dissipates around 40% of the body heat. ( I swear I need of of those [0], my head - short hair nonetheless - is sweating like hell in the night ) [0] https://www.amazon.com/Mediflow-1006-06-Original-Waterbase-Pillow/dp/B003J372NS/ https://www.amazon.com/Mediflow-1006-06-Original-Waterbase-P...
mysterypie 9y ago
> A human brain would be impossible to sustain without cooked foods. How do we explain the survival of people that eat only raw foods even today? Wouldn't that argue against your theory? I suppose we're speaking about a population and that there will be individual exceptions. But even in a population, shouldn't raw food eaters die sooner or be worse off than cooked food eaters on average?
- CuriouslyC 9y ago
  One problem with that is the fact that people (at least in the west) who choose to eat raw food are usually health conscious and comparably affluent. This biases the sample. Furthermore, the issue is complicated by the effects on adults vs children.
- steve_adams_86 9y ago
  I guess it could be argued that raw food dieters now have access to rich foods like oils, avocados, sprouted legumes and grains, nuts and seeds, etc. That makes the diet far easier than it would have been even 100 years ago, I think. I'm not in favor or opposed to the person you're responding to. Just thinking about how humans eating a raw diet are different from other animals doing so.

gambiting 9y ago

By following this logic, would Dogs evolve to be more and more intelligent, given that we feed them nothing but a high-calorie diet with zero need for any survival skills? I suspect that high intelligence does not give them any evolutionary advantage and therefore wouldn't become dominant, but then humans do like "smart" dogs and could selectively breed them for intelligence. No?

marcus_holmes 9y ago
this seems like something we could test... selective breeding for smarter dogs. Mind you, we'd have to establish a metric for smarter first. Sheepdogs and their ability to control a mob of sheep always seemed to me to be pretty damned smart...