Cooking and Intelligence

[annecros]

Live Science published an interesting article the other day.

Cooking and Cognition: How humans got so smart.

From the article:

For a long time, we were pretty dumb. Humans did little but make "the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years," he said. Then, only about 150,000 years ago, a different type of spurt happened — our big brains suddenly got smart. We started innovating. We tried different materials, such as bone, and invented many new tools, including needles for beadwork. Responding to, presumably, our first abstract thoughts, we started creating art and maybe even religion.

The article goes on to explain that differences in the brains of apes and humans were the most robust when comparing energy metabolism in the brain.

The extra calories may not have come from more food, but rather from the emergence of pre-historic "Iron Chefs;" the first hearths also arose about 200,000 years ago.

In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains.

Instead of growing even larger (which would have made birth even more problematic), the human brain most likely used the additional calories to grease the wheels of its internal functioning.

I've always wondered about the imaginations of those first peoples who managed to envision early cooking practices.

I wonder, chicken and egg thing here, which came first - the smarts to cook, or the cooking making people smarter? I seem to remember chimpanzees using tools to fish termites - but they haven't progressed much further in the culinary arts.

What about cultivation of food crops? Wouldn't that take some abstract thinking? Did that come before, after or about the same time as the BBQ? Perhaps it is the ladies that prepared the side dishes for Mr. Mammoths big BBQ that got into the really abstract thought.

Finally, does this answer the question of "why" of the Cooking is Sexy if you are a Guy issue?

[Magictofu]

So if I understand it right, the more food is processed outside the body, the more energy is freed for brain activity... Does that mean Wonderbread, baloney and soft drinks makes us smart?