Cooking?

Turtwig

Hey guys,

When did we start doing it and what exactly compelled us to do it? I know it's what is believe to be responsible for our "bigger" brains but I can find very little on what researchers think caused us to start cooking food approx 50,000 to 1 million years ago. Anyhelp regarding clues and resources will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Malt



P.s A word of warning to anyone who does use google for this be prepared for tonnes of nonsense about the benefits of raw uncooked food diets.

looksee

Perhaps it was something as simple as discovering that animals and grain that had been burned in a forest fire were easier to eat than raw food?

Mahatma coat

Watching Bear Gryllis and others gives a rather interesting insight on this, when dealin with smaller animals its a lot easier to Burn the fur off than it is to skin them, this might have led to the development of cooking.

Bread tho, theres one that befuddles me what sort of accidental situation has to arise in a Hunter gatherer society to bring about that?

Wibbs

Big brains. That and food and nutrient availability to feed them. Cooking makes more foods more bioavailable to a gut originally more herbivorous in makeup. Early humans are (very basically) like upright walking great apes. We were just one species in a whole heap of upright apes. Like the great apes we were mostly veggie eaters with some meat.

Where we started to differ was in our brain size. Brains need protein to build among other things. They need more calories to run. Raw foods didn't cut it, or didn't cut it enough. They take ages to gather and are heavily seasonal and fragile to environment change. Carniivores have one advantage. If it moves you can eat it and lots of things move regardless of the environment you find yourself in. So a monkey that only eats fruit in SE Asia would die in ireland, whereas a tiger from the same area could eat any number of things in Ireland.

Problem was we were more veggie eaters. Bigger bellies to break down the plant food, big grinding teeth ditto. But we had those big brains which came up with external evolution. Crap teeth? Sharp stone tools Ted. Gut acid not as strong as a pure carnivore? Cook it Ted. We're the first animal to externalise and take control of our own evolution without having to wait for nature. Soon after that we started to change and look different. Australopithecines like the famous Lucy skeleton have A shaped ribcages, big bellies and no waist to speak of. All to house their longer guts. Homo Erectus has a waist and small belly and a more V shape, more like a predator/omnivore.

On the bread front Mahatma coat, it turns out we've been eating cooked grains longer than previously thought. Residues on 80,000 yr old Neandertal teeth show this. How did we figure it out? Probably watched birds and the like feeding on grains and seeds and nuts and tried it. We were already nut eaters and grains are kinda like small nuts. We were also cooking stuff, so when we found raw seeds were hard going just threw them in the fire to see how it went. More likely under the fire. Evidence for this comes from mesolithic modern man, who would scrape a shallow depression, lay in a bed of sand, then a layer of say hazelnuts, then covered with more sand. Light a fire on top. Kick back gossip for a while, brush away the embers and presto cooked nuts. Nuts can be tough and astringent. Try eating 10 raw hazelnuts in a go. Your mouth will look like this X Cooked and they're much more tasty. Plus cooked they last for ages so can tide you over as a snack days later. Then we'd notice that cooked nuts and seeds become softer and more gooey. Since they're small food items someone just thought "Hang on Mick we can mash this into a biscuit". Bread was born.

Mahatma coat

OK, thats the most sensible explanation I've heard for the Bread thing, thanks

I suppose then its arguable that the most important trait in our Evolution was - Monkey see Monkey do. facilitated by our big brains, but isnt that a chicken and egg type scenario, the big brains led to the development of cooking/the development of cooking led to the big brain

Wibbs

The big brain was already there, or at least the start of it. The bigger brain brings innovation, which leads to more food, bigger brain and so on. Then the environment seems to have changed from forest to grassland which may have driven the need for novel foods even more.

Chicken and egg? defo the egg

Mahatma coat

so when do cooking utensils like pots show up in our History??

Wibbs

Around 10,000 years ago IIRC. In the far east, china or japan, can't recall precisely where.

Mahatma coat

just googled Nenaderthal pottery, rather interesting that they had Weapons and tailoring but no pottery, thats a bit wierd, you get all the benefits of an advanced domestic society without the initial domestic advancement.

Chinese pottery is another interesting topic for a different thread, they perfected pottery but never bothered with Glass

Wibbs

Mahatma coat wrote: »

just googled Nenaderthal pottery, rather interesting that they had Weapons and tailoring but no pottery,

Well tailoring is still up in the air with them MC as no needles have so far been found on definite Neandertal sites. Even evolutions in stone tools can be hard to pin down if you don't find a body in situ at the same level. Without the bones the stones can be a bit of (good) guesswork. It means overlap with moderns can be hard to call. Personally I suspect they did have needles or used stone augers in place of them.

thats a bit wierd, you get all the benefits of an advanced domestic society without the initial domestic advancement.

Well it depends on your needs. Pottery kinda goes hand in hand with the emergence of farming. I'd reckon the need to regularly store food probably came before the need for cooking vessels. Hunter gatherers have less need of food storage for all sorts of reasons. Wider selection of food sources for a start, or food that spoils much more easily. That said they used other containers(as ones left do today). Animal, even human skulls, wooden boxes(which don't preserve or rarely) animal horns and most of all leather. Judging by the amount of stone scrapers found with neandertals and moderns they were likely skilled with the material. Again leather doesn't preserve or very rarely. You can see echoes of its use though. Scientists in Spain excavating a Neandertal site found evidence of collection and refinement of various pigments(inc sparkley stuff like the ladies are fond of today. Very fancy cavemen ). For a start this shows some sort of body adornment which is another thread in of itself, but some samples were found in a concentrated lump which suggested that they were in leather pouches which have since decayed.

Chinese pottery is another interesting topic for a different thread, they perfected pottery but never bothered with Glass

Yea they were so far ahead on that score. Some gorgeous examples have survived. Odd about glass alriight. I'd theorise they didn't bother with glass, because their early pottery is uncoloured. They didn't use glazes. In Europe and the ME they went mad for colour, at first painted on top of the fired pot. Some bright spark or a bunch of bright sparks probably tried firing the pot a secnd time, even as a mistake and found that some pigments vitrified and became permanent. that may have made them think "oh hang on, maybe we can make entire vessels out of other stuff, not just clay". That and being cheapskates. Egyptian faience a type of glass or vitrified material came about so ordinary people could have items that looked like they were made out of more precious materials.

slowburner

Malty_T wrote: »

Hey guys,

When did we start doing it and what exactly compelled us to do it? I know it's what is believe to be responsible for our "bigger" brains but I can find very little on what researchers think caused us to start cooking food approx 50,000 to 1 million years ago. Anyhelp regarding clues and resources will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Malt



P.s A word of warning to anyone who does use google for this be prepared for tonnes of nonsense about the benefits of raw uncooked food diets.

I think it is hugely important to remember that our predecessors were not any "thicker" than we are. What we know now, is the sum total of what our predecessors figured out. They had all the ability to learn that we have.
Ok fine, 40,000 BP they didn't know about Mozart or Logical Positivism - but if the last piece of meat fell into the fire and smelled really good - they were not going to leave it there, were they?

Indulge me for a second.
You are walking down the road on a calm summer's evening when you get that most wonderful whiff of a barbecue. It has an instant effect, you want to go to there and eat (well I do anyway). The smell which has the strongest effect is the melting fat dripping on the coals (freshly baked bread does it too) - it produces a visceral effect. I am convinced that this sensory/emotional effect is a direct legacy and indicator of our social past. I firmly believe that it is the only visceral reaction left in our psyche from our hunter gatherer past. Go back to our hunter gatherer past and imagine yourself wandering through a forbidding forest full of dangerous animals when you catch that whiff. You would not be going in the opposite direction, would you? We are programmed to share food.

Wibbs

slowburner wrote: »

I think it is hugely important to remember that our predecessors were not any "thicker" than we are.

+1

Ok fine, 40,000 BP they didn't know about Mozart or Logical Positivism

True though they even there they did have among their number a few who produced some of the most sublime art of humanity to date. In one way I think we can blame writing and history for the notion that art and science and genius started with named figures. Newgrange and Knowth in Ireland another good example of genius among "stone age" peoples. The evolution of culture in modern humans is a very interesting one. It didn't come hand in hand with physical modernity. We were fully modern for the guts of 60,000 yrs + before we see the explosion of that(with a few isolated and tentative blips before).

Indulge me for a second.
You are walking down the road on a calm summer's evening when you get that most wonderful whiff of a barbecue. It has an instant effect, you want to go to there and eat (well I do anyway). The smell which has the strongest effect is the melting fat dripping on the coals (freshly baked bread does it too) - it produces a visceral effect. I am convinced that this sensory/emotional effect is a direct legacy and indicator of our social past. I firmly believe that it is the only visceral reaction left in our psyche from our hunter gatherer past.

Good point. Never thought about that one. I'd add others though. Fear of the dark being another.

We are programmed to share food.

I'd say we were alright and are still if living as hunter gatherers. Many reports exist of hunter gatherers having little concept of ownership and theft and like you say share everything. That changes with farming and the ability to store food. A HG fells a buffalo or digs up roots and he/she can only eat enough to sate themselves at one sitting. They can't store it so they may as well share for the good of the group. It's no skin of ones nose to do so. However if one can store food longterm, one can stockpile it and name it as "yours" or "ours". The old HG hunting territories become more important as arable land. Something that can be named and measured and owned and passed on(and fought over). I'd say the modern world and mind is built on the twin foundations of sharing to a point and for a fee and selfishness in support of what you name as yours.

slowburner

Wibbs wrote: »

I'd add others though. Fear of the dark being another.

And I never thought about that one. Any more?

slowburner

Actually, there is something I heard about recently (forget where) which sort of relates to the above.
At a certain age - when they can walk, I think - children are repulsed by the taste of fruit and vegetables. Those foods taste bitter to them - completely different to how they taste to an adult. The reason is to prevent them from wandering about and eating whatever attractive thing looks like a fruit or vegetable, until they have been educated as to what is safe to eat. Another legacy still with us from our H/G past.

Sea Sharp

The earliest trace of fire in Europe was 400,000 years ago.
I'd imagine the discovery of cooking would have been a hand in hand coincidence, when there was controlled fires around and people noted food tasted different when heated.

Torakx

Im currently in the middle of reading a book called "Catching fire,how cooking made us human"
By Richard Wrangham.
Its in Easons for about a tenner.

He covers alot about time lines, fossil evidence and biology.
He states that the reason the human brain was able to evolve to be bigger than before, was because cooking and eating meat made it easier to digest food and therefore our lower intestine got smaller over time which allowed us to streamline the energy we use from food to feed it to our brains instead of using alot of it to help digest vegetation and raw foods.
I think he made a comparison to all animals regarding the length of the intestine and the size of the brain.

One example was chimapnzees whosometimes eat small animals and nuts,seeds etc.
They have slightly larger brains and smaller intestines than their gorilla cousins who mostly live on vegetation and have large lower intestines and smaller brains.

An interesting(although offtopic) thing i learned is that while eggs are possibly the best source of protein for our bodies to consume,eating them raw loses us alot of the benefit which goes contrary to the popular belief of alot of body builders.

I cant remember time lines but in that book he does cover fossil evidence and dental records to make a good guess as to when we started cooking our meat and how it had an effect on us as we evovled.