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What I never understood is why cooking was needed by early humans. Other animals eat raw food, and scavengers don't even eat freshly killed food, yet they do ju

What I never understood is why cooking was needed by early humans. Other animals eat raw food, and scavengers don't even eat freshly killed food, yet they do just fine. Sure, I can understand as humans moved to cooked food that we may have lost our ability to handle food in these states. The only thing I could think of is that the caloric advantage of digesting meat offered an immediate advantage.

brnt 6y ago
Our gastrointestinal tract is designed for fruit, like most apes. Not plant or meat. Out of adaptation to new locales without abundant fruit, we've had to learn how to properly preprocess things were not very good at processing ourselves.
- adrianN 6y ago
  Chimps are known to hunt and eat meat. Bonobos too.
  - brnt 6y ago
    Its important to distinguish the majority of diet with the occasional snack, which often happens to supplement a particular nutrient or mineral. My cats eat vegetables daily too, but it only makes up a percent of their diet.
- msla 6y ago
  Except chimps hunt, and get important nutrients from meat, early humans hunted and scavenged meat, and nothing about our digestive system allows us to get as much out of plant matter (including fruit) as an herbivore can; for one thing, we can't digest cellulose. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/meat-eating-among-the-earliest-humans https://www.americanscientist.org/article/meat-eating-among-...
  - brnt 6y ago
    See reply to other comment. The reason to eat fruit is to get easy access to sugar, which we need especially due to our brains. Like how some birds require nectar to be able to power their flight. All animals supplement diets, but despite cows licking saltstone we still observe them getting the majority of intake from other sources.
    - msla 6y ago
      We need sugar to power our brains, but we need protein and fat to build our brains. That requires more than incidental amounts of protein.
      - ben_w 6y ago
        For that to be a good counter-argument, you would need to demonstrate that vegetable protein was “merely incidental” in the case you are arguing against.
        eyko 6y ago
        Vegetable protein was and still is less abundant than vegetable sugars, if I'm not mistaken? Agriculture eventually made that less of an issue but this was not the case until not that long ago (tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands of years). It's easier to eat a bug or any small prey than spend a morning gathering spinach and watercress. Humans also ate leftovers from predator kills, like the partially digested contents of herbivore stomachs that had been killed by let's say wolves. Vegetable protein was part of our diet but not by any means the main source of protein. Humans did not eat pulses until quite recently (10-15 thousand years ago?)
        rewq4321 6y ago
        > Vegetable protein was and still is less abundant than vegetable sugars, if I'm not mistaken? I'm no expert here, but humans do tend to need far more carbs than protein to be healthy - or at least can operate on something like 10% protein per joule of food consumed. And that's with a decent safety buffer. I think the predictions (based on natural experiments - i.e. famines) were that you could push as low as 4% before a human body can't handle it. Though I'd guess that if you get anywhere close to that your body is going to start making some significant trade-offs. Also: Don't forget about nuts and seeds. > Vegetable protein was part of our diet but not by any means the main source of protein. I think a citation (or three) is needed here.
- mantap 6y ago
  Forget the gastrointestinal tract and look at our teeth. We have a wide variety of different teeth suitable for an omnivorous hunter-gatherer diet.
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  Nah. Our digestion is not based on fermentation, but on using acid to break things down. It’s closer to a dog’s than a gorilla’s.
- lambdaba 6y ago
  On the contrary, our stomach acidity is higher than even carnivores, indicating we are adapted to scavenging.
pja 6y ago
IIRC it's easier (smaller energy cost) to absorb nutrients from cooked food than raw food. So there's an immediate evolutionary advantage to eating cooked food - you get more energy out of the same total food calorie input.
- rewq4321 6y ago
  That, and cooking allows you to eat things which would have otherwise been inedible (e.g. by denaturing their poisonous proteins). Saves you a million years of cat-and-mouse co-evolution to be able to consume it.
  - lambdaba 6y ago
    I think you meant poisonous plant compounds, but fermentation is a more effective process for this and is lower-tech.
- lambdaba 6y ago
  That doesn't apply to meat though (at the very least). Water-soluble nutrients are destroyed by heat. Also, heat denatures protein, that would make it harder to use, not easier.
  - mr-ron 6y ago
    Do you have a source for this claim you keep posting? Quick search immediately appears to be the opposite, that cooked meat is easier to digest than raw https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/03/20/why-cooked-meat-is-easier-for-humans-to-digest-than-raw-meat/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/03/20/why-cooked-mea...
    - lambdaba 6y ago
      B vitamins are water soluble and heat will evaporate water... Likewise for vitamin C. The other is personal experience. Try eating tartare and then some cooked meat and compare digestion & satiety. With raw meat I reach satiety much quicker. Perhaps an experience closer to most is raw fish as sushi etc.
gibolt 6y ago
It generally tastes better cooked, or at least was different. For those who started doing it, they got the unknown benefit of more energy absorption leading to a long-term societal evolution to do so to most food (as they had a better survival chance).
- interator7 6y ago
  Wouldn't it only have tasted better as a result of evolution selecting for gene lines that preferred cooked food(more efficient calorie intake)?
  - vitus 6y ago
    Not necessarily! Due to chemical reactions, certain foods are sweeter, less bitter, and so forth when cooked. (e.g. onions caramelize, glucosinolates [0] in kale leach out when blanching) Evolution already predisposed us to like sugary foods (e.g. fruit) and dislike bitter ones [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucosinolate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucosinolate [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_taste_evolution#Toxins_as_the_primary_selective_force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_taste_evolution#Toxins_...
masklinn 6y ago
> What I never understood is why cooking was needed by early humans. It's unlikely that it was needed per-se, but the discovery of cooking would have significantly improved the sanitary conditions of food as well as the available caloric budget, which would allow for later advances. It put calories in the bank, so to speak, or allowed accessing calories otherwise unavailable letting early humans occupy niches or enter ecosystems they couldn't otherwise have. > The only thing I could think of is that the caloric advantage of digesting meat offered an immediate advantage. Digesting meat is easier when cooked, it's also much more sanitary leading to lower incidences of disease and lower parasitic loads, translating to higher survival rates & lower ongoing energy use. Many plant foods are also largely to entirely indigestible to us without cooking, they may have been in use before cooking as e.g. mere fibrous matter, but cooking also made these available as energy sources, or significantly less dangerous. For instance sweet potatoes are inedible raw but not toxic (unlike cassava) and the sprouts are edible (unlike potatoes), so they might have been consumed from wild forage for the sprouts and as filler (for the tuber) until people stumbled on the ability to cook them and unlock the tuber's stores.
ant6n 6y ago
The less energy and body mass spent in the digestive system, the more you got for brains ... and walking.
lordnacho 6y ago
IIRC the thinking is that you need less intestine if your food is cooked. So less internal upkeep costs, less internal risk of stuff getting stuck, infected, etc. You're also less likely to catch a parasite if you cook stuff, that would be a caloric catastrophe. Also cooking stuff allows you to share costs with other people. One big fire for everyone, nobody needs their own extra capacity.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  From what I read, the #1 thing is that if you eat "paleo" food, then cooking it nearly doubles the net caloric intake. That's huge! For "modern" foods that have undergone thousands of years of selection to improve palatability, the difference is not so big, but still, a common dieting technique is to eat more uncooked food, because it reduces the effective calorie intake.
tiku 6y ago
Perhaps they knew warm food was relatable to a fresh kill?
TheButlerian 6y ago
Because you are an idiot, this is why you cannot understand.
pvaldes 6y ago
Cooking introduces you to the idea of smoking. Being able to preserve meat for months and months without leaving your reserves outside for scavengers, or without being forced to spend valuable calories to unfreeze it in the worst day of winter, is a game changer And cooking turns parasites into food also.
kiba 6y ago
IIRC Animal can absolutely digests cooked food better. The problem is that most animals are incapable of figuring out how to cook food.
BurningFrog 6y ago
This is a very good and important question. We do know the answers: Cooking roughly doubles the nutritional value of food. The heat breaks down complex, undigestable molecules to simpler ones. It also eliminates bacteria and parasites. Most species would benefit a lot from cooking food, if they could figure out how. Somewhat controversial book on how fire shaped our species: https://smile.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465020410/ https://smile.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp...
- lambdaba 6y ago
  That nutritional availability may apply to plant matter (and not in all cases), but certainly not to meat, which likely was the major part of the diet. On the contrary, cooking destroys enzymes and evaporates water-soluble vitamins. Bacteria are also very useful for digestion and all meat is aged even today (obviously). My take is that it was simply a chance discovery of enhanced taste.
  - mushbino 6y ago
    What is the effect of heat on protein? Does it aid in making it easier to digest or does it have a negative impact on protein content and availability?
    - lambdaba 6y ago
      Well, I certainly don't see how burning the protein would make it more suitable for assimilation, I think it's a myth that's just been repeated without any evidence, if there is any I'm interested in hearing it, intuitively it doesn't make sense. Fermentation & aging by bacteria on the other hand does breakdown meat and eases digestion, and it's a tradition all cultures have kept in some form, as evidenced by numerous dishes still consumed today.
      - siberianbear 6y ago
        "Burning" may not be the right word. Denaturing (i.e., the proteins losing their quaternary structure) may be what increases bio-availability
nkrisc 6y ago
As others have said, it increases available calories and nutrition. It also makes sense, thermodynamically. You're using outside, normally unavailable energy (the fuel) to process your food so that you're not using the precious little energy you've managed to store in your body. It increases the total available energy to your body by indirectly supplementing with sources you normally couldn't.

brnt 6y ago

Our gastrointestinal tract is designed for fruit, like most apes. Not plant or meat. Out of adaptation to new locales without abundant fruit, we've had to learn how to properly preprocess things were not very good at processing ourselves.

adrianN 6y ago
Chimps are known to hunt and eat meat. Bonobos too.
- brnt 6y ago
  Its important to distinguish the majority of diet with the occasional snack, which often happens to supplement a particular nutrient or mineral. My cats eat vegetables daily too, but it only makes up a percent of their diet.
msla 6y ago
Except chimps hunt, and get important nutrients from meat, early humans hunted and scavenged meat, and nothing about our digestive system allows us to get as much out of plant matter (including fruit) as an herbivore can; for one thing, we can't digest cellulose. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/meat-eating-among-the-earliest-humans https://www.americanscientist.org/article/meat-eating-among-...
- brnt 6y ago
  See reply to other comment. The reason to eat fruit is to get easy access to sugar, which we need especially due to our brains. Like how some birds require nectar to be able to power their flight. All animals supplement diets, but despite cows licking saltstone we still observe them getting the majority of intake from other sources.
  - msla 6y ago
    We need sugar to power our brains, but we need protein and fat to build our brains. That requires more than incidental amounts of protein.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      For that to be a good counter-argument, you would need to demonstrate that vegetable protein was “merely incidental” in the case you are arguing against.
      - eyko 6y ago
        Vegetable protein was and still is less abundant than vegetable sugars, if I'm not mistaken? Agriculture eventually made that less of an issue but this was not the case until not that long ago (tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands of years). It's easier to eat a bug or any small prey than spend a morning gathering spinach and watercress. Humans also ate leftovers from predator kills, like the partially digested contents of herbivore stomachs that had been killed by let's say wolves. Vegetable protein was part of our diet but not by any means the main source of protein. Humans did not eat pulses until quite recently (10-15 thousand years ago?)
        rewq4321 6y ago
        > Vegetable protein was and still is less abundant than vegetable sugars, if I'm not mistaken? I'm no expert here, but humans do tend to need far more carbs than protein to be healthy - or at least can operate on something like 10% protein per joule of food consumed. And that's with a decent safety buffer. I think the predictions (based on natural experiments - i.e. famines) were that you could push as low as 4% before a human body can't handle it. Though I'd guess that if you get anywhere close to that your body is going to start making some significant trade-offs. Also: Don't forget about nuts and seeds. > Vegetable protein was part of our diet but not by any means the main source of protein. I think a citation (or three) is needed here.
mantap 6y ago
Forget the gastrointestinal tract and look at our teeth. We have a wide variety of different teeth suitable for an omnivorous hunter-gatherer diet.
amanaplanacanal 6y ago
Nah. Our digestion is not based on fermentation, but on using acid to break things down. It’s closer to a dog’s than a gorilla’s.
lambdaba 6y ago
On the contrary, our stomach acidity is higher than even carnivores, indicating we are adapted to scavenging.

pja 6y ago

IIRC it's easier (smaller energy cost) to absorb nutrients from cooked food than raw food. So there's an immediate evolutionary advantage to eating cooked food - you get more energy out of the same total food calorie input.

rewq4321 6y ago
That, and cooking allows you to eat things which would have otherwise been inedible (e.g. by denaturing their poisonous proteins). Saves you a million years of cat-and-mouse co-evolution to be able to consume it.
- lambdaba 6y ago
  I think you meant poisonous plant compounds, but fermentation is a more effective process for this and is lower-tech.
lambdaba 6y ago
That doesn't apply to meat though (at the very least). Water-soluble nutrients are destroyed by heat. Also, heat denatures protein, that would make it harder to use, not easier.
- mr-ron 6y ago
  Do you have a source for this claim you keep posting? Quick search immediately appears to be the opposite, that cooked meat is easier to digest than raw https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/03/20/why-cooked-meat-is-easier-for-humans-to-digest-than-raw-meat/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/03/20/why-cooked-mea...
  - lambdaba 6y ago
    B vitamins are water soluble and heat will evaporate water... Likewise for vitamin C. The other is personal experience. Try eating tartare and then some cooked meat and compare digestion & satiety. With raw meat I reach satiety much quicker. Perhaps an experience closer to most is raw fish as sushi etc.

gibolt 6y ago

It generally tastes better cooked, or at least was different. For those who started doing it, they got the unknown benefit of more energy absorption leading to a long-term societal evolution to do so to most food (as they had a better survival chance).

interator7 6y ago
Wouldn't it only have tasted better as a result of evolution selecting for gene lines that preferred cooked food(more efficient calorie intake)?
- vitus 6y ago
  Not necessarily! Due to chemical reactions, certain foods are sweeter, less bitter, and so forth when cooked. (e.g. onions caramelize, glucosinolates [0] in kale leach out when blanching) Evolution already predisposed us to like sugary foods (e.g. fruit) and dislike bitter ones [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucosinolate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucosinolate [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_taste_evolution#Toxins_as_the_primary_selective_force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_taste_evolution#Toxins_...

masklinn 6y ago

> What I never understood is why cooking was needed by early humans. It's unlikely that it was needed per-se, but the discovery of cooking would have significantly improved the sanitary conditions of food as well as the available caloric budget, which would allow for later advances. It put calories in the bank, so to speak, or allowed accessing calories otherwise unavailable letting early humans occupy niches or enter ecosystems they couldn't otherwise have. > The only thing I could think of is that the caloric advantage of digesting meat offered an immediate advantage. Digesting meat is easier when cooked, it's also much more sanitary leading to lower incidences of disease and lower parasitic loads, translating to higher survival rates & lower ongoing energy use. Many plant foods are also largely to entirely indigestible to us without cooking, they may have been in use before cooking as e.g. mere fibrous matter, but cooking also made these available as energy sources, or significantly less dangerous. For instance sweet potatoes are inedible raw but not toxic (unlike cassava) and the sprouts are edible (unlike potatoes), so they might have been consumed from wild forage for the sprouts and as filler (for the tuber) until people stumbled on the ability to cook them and unlock the tuber's stores.

ant6n 6y ago

The less energy and body mass spent in the digestive system, the more you got for brains ... and walking.

lordnacho 6y ago

IIRC the thinking is that you need less intestine if your food is cooked. So less internal upkeep costs, less internal risk of stuff getting stuck, infected, etc. You're also less likely to catch a parasite if you cook stuff, that would be a caloric catastrophe. Also cooking stuff allows you to share costs with other people. One big fire for everyone, nobody needs their own extra capacity.

jiggawatts 6y ago
From what I read, the #1 thing is that if you eat "paleo" food, then cooking it nearly doubles the net caloric intake. That's huge! For "modern" foods that have undergone thousands of years of selection to improve palatability, the difference is not so big, but still, a common dieting technique is to eat more uncooked food, because it reduces the effective calorie intake.

tiku 6y ago

Perhaps they knew warm food was relatable to a fresh kill?

TheButlerian 6y ago

Because you are an idiot, this is why you cannot understand.

pvaldes 6y ago

Cooking introduces you to the idea of smoking. Being able to preserve meat for months and months without leaving your reserves outside for scavengers, or without being forced to spend valuable calories to unfreeze it in the worst day of winter, is a game changer And cooking turns parasites into food also.

kiba 6y ago

IIRC Animal can absolutely digests cooked food better. The problem is that most animals are incapable of figuring out how to cook food.

BurningFrog 6y ago

This is a very good and important question. We do know the answers: Cooking roughly doubles the nutritional value of food. The heat breaks down complex, undigestable molecules to simpler ones. It also eliminates bacteria and parasites. Most species would benefit a lot from cooking food, if they could figure out how. Somewhat controversial book on how fire shaped our species: https://smile.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0465020410/ https://smile.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp...

lambdaba 6y ago
That nutritional availability may apply to plant matter (and not in all cases), but certainly not to meat, which likely was the major part of the diet. On the contrary, cooking destroys enzymes and evaporates water-soluble vitamins. Bacteria are also very useful for digestion and all meat is aged even today (obviously). My take is that it was simply a chance discovery of enhanced taste.
- mushbino 6y ago
  What is the effect of heat on protein? Does it aid in making it easier to digest or does it have a negative impact on protein content and availability?
  - lambdaba 6y ago
    Well, I certainly don't see how burning the protein would make it more suitable for assimilation, I think it's a myth that's just been repeated without any evidence, if there is any I'm interested in hearing it, intuitively it doesn't make sense. Fermentation & aging by bacteria on the other hand does breakdown meat and eases digestion, and it's a tradition all cultures have kept in some form, as evidenced by numerous dishes still consumed today.
    - siberianbear 6y ago
      "Burning" may not be the right word. Denaturing (i.e., the proteins losing their quaternary structure) may be what increases bio-availability

nkrisc 6y ago

As others have said, it increases available calories and nutrition. It also makes sense, thermodynamically. You're using outside, normally unavailable energy (the fuel) to process your food so that you're not using the precious little energy you've managed to store in your body. It increases the total available energy to your body by indirectly supplementing with sources you normally couldn't.