Raw Paleo Diet Forums > Hot Topics
Article says humans became intelligent because of cooked food
boxcarguy07:
My parents sent me this article: http://www.livescience.com/culture/080811-brain-evolution.html
It is clear that it is just ludicrous, and I've already emailed them back with a rebuttal, but I was wondering what some of your thoughts were on it and maybe I could get even more things to say back.
Kristelle:
1) Eating cooked meat is HARDER for digestion
2) We get more nutrients from cooked vegetables and grains, yes but these are FAR from ideal foods. We certainly did not become "smarter" with nutrients from these foods. Meat, definetly.
All I gotta say...
goodsamaritan:
If you read Guns Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond points to the advantages of storable then cookable foods for the development of tribes to become villages, towns, states.
With storable, cookable foods our civilization was built.
Of course at the expense of longevity, health, poor quality of life.
With our new information technology, we are re-discovering what it truly means to be healthy. Some of us will have the knowledge, the money and the available resources to be able to once again consume real human food / optimal human food: a raw paleolithic diet.
I got into this RPD because RPD is essential to curing people and preventing disease.
Hey, RPD works. Not just for myself, but for everyone.
As for the proportions of fruit, vegs, meat ... it depends on your current needs, your future needs, your resources available.
Satya:
That article is without references. And the author is about as dumb as they get!
Tyler and I have already picked apart the cooked food = bigger brains arguments here:
http://www.rawpaleodiet.com/advent-of-cooking-article/
Basically, the crux of our argument is: It takes brains to make fire. How did man learn how to cook? To first use, then control, and finally produce fire was a long, drawn-out process. It took bigger brains to master such feats. Thus, cooked foods did not give us bigger brains, but bigger brains gave us the ability to cook!
Ask Mom and Dad if they can produce a fire without modern technology. If they say yes, then have them doemonstrate it. Then show them that you can eat good food without the modern pyrotechnology. And when you think about the energy and time involved in making some campfire - for every meal - then you see the stupidity and wasted expense of it all.
TylerDurden:
Satya - I just noticed that you referred to Wrangham as a biological anthropologist in that essay. He most certainly is NOT! He's a chimp behaviourist and not an anthropologist at all, I thought I'd mentioned that(oh, well, perhaps only in Wikipedia). Other than making clear Wrangham's so-called "credentials" it should also be pointed out that Wrangham's theories are not viewed as credible by the majority of palaeoanthropologists. Here's a reference to an article where this is pointed out:-
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Pennisi_99.html
"But Henry Bunn, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has a more typical--and skeptical--reaction to the tuber theory. He says Wrangham's team "downplays lots of sound evidence that we have for meat-eating and fire use and accepts at face value problematic evidence." A major problem for the theory, notes Hill, is that where there's cooking smoke, there must be fire. Yet he, Michigan's Brace, and most other anthropologists contend that cooking fires began in earnest barely 250,000 years ago, when ancient hearths, earth ovens, burnt animal bones, and flint appear across Europe and the middle East. Back 2 million years ago, the only sign of fire is burnt earth with human remains, which most anthropologists consider coincidence rather than evidence of intentional fire."
This topic should really belong in the Hot Topics section, given the subject. I'll move it there - the General forum already has too many topics, anyway.
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