All About Food: Human evolution and the barbecue

Just as we have always suspected, the entire history of human civilization is based on cooking. Yes, fire had to be discovered first, but if we hadn’t started barbecuing, we would still be wandering the savannah, hunting for antelope with sharp sticks.

Our hunch has been scientifically validated by Richard Wrangham, a Harvard-based biological anthropologist, who has written a fascinating and controversial new book called “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.” He proposes the theory that it was cooking that made us human and contributed to the evolution of physiology as well as culture.

Sometime, about 2 1/2 million years ago, our brains got bigger, then, just another million years later, they swelled again and our posture and gait changed, our jaws, mouths and guts got smaller and we grew taller.

It was these changes that distinguish our species from fellow primates. Most scientists agree that the first change occurred because of a meat diet but the second change from Homo habilus to Homo erectus has never been adequately explained. Wrangham believes the explanation lies in “catching fire” and cooking food.

Drawing extensively from the fossil record for changing anatomy, observations of modern-day primates and the behavior of hunter-gatherers, as well as the science of cooking, digestion and nutrition, he argues that our evolution from ape to human, physiologically to big brains and culturally to pair bonding could only have begun when our ancestors began to cook their food.

We have interviewed a number of people on these pages in the past few years who are advocates of the raw food movement “” promoting it as the most natural and healthful way to eat.

Scientific evidence, however, has shown that cooked food, whether vegetables or meat, provides significantly more energy than food in its raw state. Cooked food is easier and quicker to digest and can also be digested with a smaller gut, releasing metabolic energy for the development of a larger brain.

Because cooked food is easier to eat, it requires less time and strength to chew, which allows the size of the jaw and teeth to be reduced, freeing the mouth for a greater range of vocalizations.

You must burn calories to release the calories from the food but because raw food is harder to digest, it requires more calories to get calories out of it and you get fewer of them anyway. So, cooked food produced a hominid that chewed less and had more time to think.

Cooking also kills bacteria and renders many natural poisons inactive. This change allowed us to eat many more safe calories every day.

Wrangham describes a meeting with extreme raw foodists who mimicked chimpanzee feeding habits by eating only one type of vegetable at a time and eating their meat raw, often in the form of marrow, taken straight from the bone. He acknowledges that raw foodists can be healthy, but they are always thin and frequently seem tired. Also, many of the women cease to ovulate.

He points out that such a diet is likely to be impossible for anyone but modern urban living people who can drive to the supermarket to find the best fruits and vegetables. His review of anthropological literature shows that no society, ancient or modern, settled or nomadic has ever survived for more than a couple of seasons on an exclusively raw diet.

The controversy with Wrangham’s theory arises because there is no physical proof to support his premise since there was no evidence of clearly defined hearths earlier than 600,000 years ago. At which time, Neanderthal cultures of Europe, the Near East and the first modern humans in Africa left behind definite fireplace structures.

However, Wrangham feels it would have been impossible for humans to be chasing around on the African savannahs hunting and scavenging, walking and running over long distances, often with low rates of success, without the energy and time provided by cooked food. There is archaeological evidence of sites of butchered animal bones and stone tools but not of actual cooking. He posits his theory by logical deduction.

Culturally, Wrangham’s ideas become more problematic but no less interesting. While the men were out hunting, the women were gathering plants, grubs, lizards and the like, tending the fire and cooking.

He suggests that cooked food had become such a valuable commodity that it became liable to theft. The aroma of roasting antelope might tempt some random, hungry impatient male to overpower a woman and steal her food.

He postulates that women provided food to men in exchange for protection, or a particular woman provided cooked food for a particular man who provided protection for her and this became the basis for pair bonding, rather than the exchange of meat for sex as traditionally assumed. Wrangham seems to think sex was far easier to find than a good woman prepared to cook your dinner.

What seems to be left out of Wrangham’s theory is the role that fire and cooking played in the development of language. He acknowledges that cooked food enabled early weaning, so that children got bigger and stronger faster, but he doesn’t discuss the origin of language as a possible result of the fire/cooking paradigm.

Dean Falk, anthropologist and chairman of the department at Florida State University, says that the discovery of fire for warmth resulted in the loss of body hair so babies could no longer cling to their mothers and because cooked food made them bigger and stronger, they were harder to carry around. So, mothers put them down while working and maintained contact by the cooing, sing-song sounds that eventually became the root of spoken language.

To read more about this interesting topic, “Catching Fire” by Richard Wrangham is available at both our local bookstores, Latitude 33 and Laguna Beach Books.

ELLE HARROW and TERRY MARKOWITZ owned A La Carte for 20 years. They can be reached for comments or questions at [email protected]