My Idea

Cooking and Human Evolution – see:

University Of Minnesota (1999, August 10). Light My Fire: Cooking As Key To Modern Human Evolution. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 24, 2007, from http://www.sciencedaily.com¬ /releases/1999/08/990810064914.htm

and

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

Hey that was my idea! Oh well Easy come easy go. That’s what happens when you’re slow out of the starting gate on a hot scientific hypothesis – AND you’re not working in the right field of science. It occurred to me (as an avid cook and more avid eater, and as extraordinary as it sounds in the 21st century to have to say this, evolution believer) a long long time ago that cooking very likely had a profound and, as the above articles suggest, perhaps THE pivotal role in human evolution.

You know how just about everyone advances their pet aspect of humanity that is displayed by no other species – tool-making, or language, or love, and so on and so on? Trouble is, one by one they’re falling by the wayside. Ask Roger and Deborah Fouts about the whole language thing, for instance. But cooking – with the possible exception of whether or not you count those galapagos marine iguanas that eat seaweed and then heat themselves (and their ingested seaweed) to high temperatures in the blazing equatorial sun – still seems to be limited to just humans. And not just limited to, but universally practiced by all human cultures.

And then there’s the brain case issue – cooking foods reduced the requirement in our ancestors for the huge jaw muscles, anchored into a volume of the skull that once released from that application could be turned over to neural occupancy.

I’ve also wondered about and speculated on the role and importance, the nutritional synergy if you will, of combining nutrients in a single cooked dish with multiple ingredients. Cue the nutritional anthropologists.

Ok, all circumstantial – I know that the hardest work of a scientist isn’t coming up with the brilliant idea – after all brilliant ideas are a dime a dozen - but to obtain the evidence that tests the ideas and, more importantly, to discard nearly all of them. I’ll leave it to Prof Wrangham to do the heavy lifting while I get started on a lemon meringue pie.