Comment by alecst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alecst | Hacker News Reader

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Stating cooking "underpins all other [human evolutionary changes]" sounds interesting if corroborated. I perused the web for some more information on Richard Wrangham's research. Wikipedia provided this:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=cooking-up-bigger-brains

http://artsci.wustl.edu/~hpontzer/Courses/Wrangham&Conkl...

...and the evidence points against him. Fire doesn't appear to have been controlled until far after Wangham assests. Not only, but:

The mainstream view among anthropologists is that the increase in human brain-size was due to a shift away from the consumption of nuts and berries to the consumption of meat.

makes more sense. The transition from primitive food sources (nuts, berries -- chimp food now) may have catalyzed the transition to a regular high-calorie diet. Take this article with a juicy fliet mignon, topped with a generous helping of salt.

Both the linked article and the sci-am article show that this is hardly a settled matter either way, and that Wrangham's thesis isn't unreasonable.

Right. I'm of the opinion that human evolution was influenced by a combination of these two factors, in addition to many others. However, given the evidence, I do not think that cooking is the preeminent contributor to cognitive/human/metabolic development.

This qualified opinion should have been your original comment.

Just as a side note, nuts are hardly a primitive food source, or just "chimp food".

Mongongo nuts are the traditional staple diet of southern African hunter-gatherers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongongo).

Per 100 grams shelled nuts (from wikipedia):

    * 57 g fat:
          o 44% polyunsaturated
          o 17% saturated
          o 18% monounsaturated
    * 24 g protein
    * 193 mg calcium
    * 4 mg zinc
    * 2.8 mg copper
    * 565 mg vitamin E (and tocopherol)

From this description, the mainstream view seems to subscribe to the discredited Lamarckian view of evolution, i.e. the idea that traits acquired during parents lifetime (e.g. bigger brains from eating meat) can be transmitted to offspring.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inheritance_of_acquired_charact...

It's not that eating meat makes your brain grow bigger. It's (eating meat)/(eating cooked food)/(having a richer diet) that makes people born with a larger brain more likely to survive. Otherwise, a larger brain would be a hindrance since your body would use more resources than you could easily consume.

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