How learning to cook set humans apart

EVOLUTION OF FOOD:TUCKING INTO a nice big fry-up represented something of a watershed for our early ancestors. Choosing to cook our food rather than eat it raw gave humans an immediate advantage in the struggle to survive.

Cavemen are typically depicted wearing skins and sitting about a campfire, with the assumption that something tasty was probably roasting on a spit.

The move to cooking and away from raw, unprocessed foods was a huge departure, said Prof Richard Wrangham, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University.

“Cooking is the signature feature of the human diet,” he stated yesterday at the AAAS meeting during a session on the dining habits of early humans.

There is no evidence to mark when early man began cooking food, but Prof Wrangham estimated that it was probably from the time of Homo erectus, about 1.8 or 2 million years ago.

Cooking imparts a whole range of survival advantages, with the most important being an increase in food value. “If you cook you get more energy from the food,” he said, and “more energy means more babies”.

Other benefits flow from cooking including greater protection against bacterial contamination, not that humans at that time would have understood the concept. Cooking also increases the digestibility of starches and proteins. This in effect lowers the energy demand required to get nourishment out of the food, he said.

Prof Wrangham has studied chimps in the wild, who survive on raw and unprocessed foods.

They are highly adapted for this lifestyle with powerful jaws and strong teeth.

“Humans are not adapted to eat raw food,” he said, as seen in our smaller jaws and teeth and also our alimentary canal, which is not designed for rough plant material.

“We have been selected to save on these features because we can get by without them.”

Another human dietary characteristic was our ability to find something edible just about anywhere.

“The hallmark of human dietary evolution, what made humans human, is being able to find and make a meal in any environment,” according to Prof William Leonard, professor of anthropology at Northwestern University in Illinois. “We have a remarkable ability to find food virtually anywhere,” he said.

Prof Leonard has studied subsistence societies around the world and while the menu changes from group to group, all manage to take in enough calories to keep them going.