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News & ArtsTuesday, March 2, 2010
Science The History of Chewing
Posted by Charles Mudede on Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 9:31 AM
What separates us from the chimps? What makes us infinitely smart and chimps eternally stupid? Chewing:
Cooking is something we all take for granted but a new theory suggests that if we had not learned to cook food, not only would we still look like chimps but, like them, we would also be compelled to spend most of the day chewing.So our brains came from chewing and our language came from grooming? Makes one wonder where our big penises came from. Even a gorilla can't compete with human meat.Without cooking, an average person would have to eat around five kilos of raw food to get enough calories to survive.
The daily mountain of fruit and vegetables would mean a six-hour chewing marathon.
3
If we ate nothing but raw food and vegetables, that would probably be an accurate statement. However, raw meat (which is quite edible - trust me) is just as full of nutrition as cooked meat, and I'm sure our ancestors ate plenty of it.
I'm not buying this.
I'm not buying this.
4
There was a Nova episode touching on this a few months ago:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beta/evolut…
In a nutshell, a mutation that drastically weakened early humans' jaw strength also made it possible for the brain to get larger over time. I was doing something else while this was on, but I recall the scientist talking head comparing apes' bite strength to human thigh strength.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beta/evolut…
In a nutshell, a mutation that drastically weakened early humans' jaw strength also made it possible for the brain to get larger over time. I was doing something else while this was on, but I recall the scientist talking head comparing apes' bite strength to human thigh strength.
5
I like how half of Charles' posts are him trying to prove he's smarter than a chimp. I'm still not convinced.
6
I suppose that really should have been obvious, but, uh, that last link is definitely NSFW. Yeesh.
9
Meat was the key. High protein that let our brains grow. Many people do not eat cooked foods and they still function.
10
Charles:
What makes you think humans are "infinitely smart?" Since we in the the developed world are busy destroying the ecoystems that we depend upon as if a prize existed for rabid consumption and rabid pollution, I don't see how we qualify as "smart." Dr William Rees stated "If we look at the history of human civilizations in the apast, those civilizations tht stuck rigourously to their existing social structure, economic structure and their existing mythology almost invariabley collapsed when the crunch came." We in the "Anglosphere" seem determined that, faced with climate change, we will change nothingand follow the trajectory described above.
http://connexionsandcontradictions.blogs…
What makes you think humans are "infinitely smart?" Since we in the the developed world are busy destroying the ecoystems that we depend upon as if a prize existed for rabid consumption and rabid pollution, I don't see how we qualify as "smart." Dr William Rees stated "If we look at the history of human civilizations in the apast, those civilizations tht stuck rigourously to their existing social structure, economic structure and their existing mythology almost invariabley collapsed when the crunch came." We in the "Anglosphere" seem determined that, faced with climate change, we will change nothingand follow the trajectory described above.
http://connexionsandcontradictions.blogs…
11
@3: Even raw meat requires a lot more chewing than cooked meat; cooking tenderizes the muscle. It's actually pretty difficult to sustain yourself on just raw meat.
13
@1, I suspect modern raw-foodists may benefit from thousands of years of plant domestication and breeding.
Pretty cool to think cooking may have played an important role in our evolution... Plus the guy munching the chicken in the BBC video was great.
Pretty cool to think cooking may have played an important role in our evolution... Plus the guy munching the chicken in the BBC video was great.
14
Charles, your last line should really be "A gorilla in particular can't compete with human meat." They actually have incredibly small penises for their body size, among the smallest for primates at all. See Dixson 1987 - the size of the baculum (the penis bone) in primates is correlated to how long they spend copulating. By extension, all that having a larger penis suggests is that we spend more time screwing.
16
I'm a total layman at this, so bear with me, but since the disappearance of the sagittal crest predates evidence of cooking in the human lineage, wouldn't that suggest that our hominid ancestors were already moving towards smaller chewing muscles and smaller dentition?
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