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It could be that cooking made the brain bigger. Cooking gave access to a huge untaped food source that most animals cant eat: starchy vegetables like tubers. T

by vfc1 8y ago

It could be that cooking made the brain bigger. Cooking gave access to a huge untaped food source that most animals cant eat: starchy vegetables like tubers. These are ubiquotous and can be stored in a dry and cold place sometimes for years, easily a year. Its a ton of energy that unlike fruit and meat is easily storable for later, and much easier to catch than a gazelle.

xyzzyz 8y ago
When anatomically modern humans first appeared, they weren’t into gathering and storing food for much later use, because they simply moved too much for it to make sense. Additionally, the best way many tubers is to just leave them in the ground. Agricultural year cycle of planting and harvest, with long periods of storing the produce is very recent phenomenon in evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, and not even universal at that — it is northern thing, because it is tied to grain based agriculture . African and South American peoples often practice agriculture when they simply leave tubers in the ground and harvest as needed. It makes the social dynamics much different too, because it makes it less profitable to raid and steal neighbors food supplies, as they will spoil relatively quickly when pulled out of the ground, unlike wheat, rye, millets or rice.
- vfc1 8y ago
  Yes I think so too that storing for months laters at scale started much later. But it probably also made sense to collect them and store them before they germinate into a plant at least a few of them, otherwise then we can't eat them anymore. Before moving around, they probably grabbed a bunch of them in a simple basket to have some food later in the day in an unknown place. Most importantly, tubers are available at a much wider range of latitudes than tropical fruit. Chimps cant go very far away from the equator due to that, unlike hominids who have developed the enzimes to digest cooked starch.

by vfc1 8y ago

xyzzyz 8y ago

When anatomically modern humans first appeared, they weren’t into gathering and storing food for much later use, because they simply moved too much for it to make sense. Additionally, the best way many tubers is to just leave them in the ground. Agricultural year cycle of planting and harvest, with long periods of storing the produce is very recent phenomenon in evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, and not even universal at that — it is northern thing, because it is tied to grain based agriculture . African and South American peoples often practice agriculture when they simply leave tubers in the ground and harvest as needed. It makes the social dynamics much different too, because it makes it less profitable to raid and steal neighbors food supplies, as they will spoil relatively quickly when pulled out of the ground, unlike wheat, rye, millets or rice.

vfc1 8y ago
Yes I think so too that storing for months laters at scale started much later. But it probably also made sense to collect them and store them before they germinate into a plant at least a few of them, otherwise then we can't eat them anymore. Before moving around, they probably grabbed a bunch of them in a simple basket to have some food later in the day in an unknown place. Most importantly, tubers are available at a much wider range of latitudes than tropical fruit. Chimps cant go very far away from the equator due to that, unlike hominids who have developed the enzimes to digest cooked starch.