I am
arguably the world’s worst cook, so I avoid it as much as possible. I do, however, love to eat good food, and I
suppose I always thought that the purpose of cooking was to turn tasteless and
chewy raw ingredients into something delicious.
To the extent that I thought about it at all, I assumed that cooking was
something that developed somewhere in our evolutionary past when one of our
distant ancestors dropped a chuck of raw meat into the fire and
it took him a while to fish it out. I
visualized a Neanderthal or the like doing this.
Maybe this just displays my general
ignorance. Recently, on a long plane trip, I read a book that had a very different interpretation of events and one I
found fascinating. It’s an African story;
wherever this happened, it was somewhere in Africa. And with the Cradle of
Humankind up the road from where I live, it might have been quite close by.
The book is
CATCHING FIRE: How cooking made us human by Richard Wrangham. The author is the
Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard and an expert on
Chimpanzees on the side. This guy knows his stuff. It is sometimes said that we
are what we eat. The thesis of this book is that it’s not what we ate that
mattered, but that we cooked it first.
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| Professor Wrangham and friends Compare the teeth! |
The book
starts out gently explaining that raw food is great except that it takes a long
time to chew up and a lot of energy to digest.
Much of the food value is wasted. What you need is big, strong teeth, heavy jaw muscles, and
plenty of lower intestine. My neighbors
up the road here had all that. They were much smaller than humans but had bigger teeth. I did know that.
I suppose I just thought that our smaller teeth resulted from our larger
overall size and changed diet. Well,
right. Professor Wrangham points out
that it's diet that drives evolution, never the other way around. It was when our ancestors started cooking
their food that two things happened, probably over quite a short space of time
in evolutionary terms. The one was that
they were now getting much more nutrition from the same amount of food. That’s
because breaking down the cellular structure with heat makes the nutrients more easily
accessible. The other was that we could eat more quickly. The food was softer,
less chewing was required, and less digestion.
Over time our teeth changed to reflect that situation and our guts changed
appropriately too.
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| Australopithecus Sediba |
The
archaeological record shows that humans controlled fire about half a million
years ago and maybe much earlier. At Swartkrans in South Africa and at locations
in Kenya, there are sites dating back one and a half million years with suggestions
of fire use. This physical evidence is disputed so Wrangham turns to biology instead,
seeking the change in anatomy that would link with the cooked food.
Over the last two million years, there were
only three periods when our ancestors’ evolution was fast and strong enough to
justify a change in species names. The crucial
one occurred some 1.8 million years ago when Homo erectus emerged from the
australopithecines. ‘Suddenly’ we had a
much larger creature, one that walked and ran and was probably not well suited
to climbing, had smaller teeth, and probably differently structured guts. It had to be fire that allowed the erectus part. The African savanna was not a safe place to
be on the ground at night with saber tooth cats all over the place. The australopithecines were probably excellent climbers and slept in trees as all
modern apes do. But if you were cooking
around a cheerful bonfire, sleeping around it – presumably with a watchman to
keep the fire fed – would be safe and comfortable. So the implication is that it was the possession
of fire and the rudimentary art of cooking that drove the development of Homo.
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| Skull of Homo Erectus |
That in
itself is a pretty intriguing idea. But
there’s more. If we were happily eating roasted meat and
broiled vegetables all that time ago, why did our brain size develop? It turns out that the development of brain tissue is very expensive in terms of energy demands. Wrangham believes that what we think of as
intelligence was needed for social interaction rather than for food
gathering. It was the excess of
nutrition from the cooked food that allowed the extra resources to feed and
develop our brains. Thus it was cooking that led to our intelligence, rather than
the other way around.
Wrangham
has one final twist. He observes that universally in hunter-gatherer
communities, the women do the cooking. (The exceptions are a few instances when
men do some culturally significant form of cooking and he dismisses those.) Men
do the hunting – or whatever else they want to do – and leave the vital cooking
task to the women. In a few societies,
it's much more significant for a woman to feed a man than to have sex with
him. If she gives him dinner, they're married.
Wrangham toys with the idea that as
cooking developed, females could be set upon and have their food stolen, so they
made alliances with males, not for sex and procreation as is the conventional
wisdom – generally apes don't do that - but for shared food and resources and for defense against food
thieves. So much for ‘family values!’ It’s all about food! Wrangham obviously feels very
uncomfortable that this prehistoric motivation has settled into modern times as
an excuse give women a subservient role. He concludes this
chapter with:
“The idea that cooking led to our pair-bonds suggests a worldwide
irony. Cooking brought huge nutritional benefits. But for women, the adoption
of cooking also led to a major increase in their vulnerability to male
authority. Men were the greater beneficiaries. Cooking freed women’s time and
fed their children, but it also trapped women into a newly subservient role
enforced by a male dominated culture. Cooking created and perpetuated a novel
system of male cultural superiority. It is not a pretty picture.”
Michael -
Thursday
