Behold the Wonderwerk cave in South Africa, yet another place on my travel bucket list and also an archaeological site giving evidence for one of the most important inventions humans ever came up with: cooking.
Ashes and bone fragments from Wonderwerk have been found from a million years ago, suggesting that our distant relatives, Homo Erectus, were using fire to cook their food at that time. This evidence goes along with the primatologist Richard Wangham’s thesis that cooking is responsible for enormous physiological changes to the human brain.
About 1.9 million years ago the evolutionary trajectory of hominins (our family of primates) underwent great transitions — our teeth and guts got smaller in proportion to our brains, which got exponentially larger. But brains are metabolically expensive and cost a lot of calories.
Also around this time, we were needing our bigger human brains ever more, because we were increasingly dependent on being sociable (sociability=big brains). In fact, human infants must transition away from a purely breastfed diet much earlier than other primates do relative to their lifespans. After a year, we need to have our diets supplemented with other foods in order to keep up our brain development. And human infants and babies can’t feed themselves — we need a whole social network of mothers and relatives and friends to make this feeding possible. So much social coordination requires big brains.
Back to cooking — turns out, cooking food is a great way to be efficient with calories. Cooking denatures proteins and gelatinizes starches, and this makes the calories in food easier to metabolize. Cooking of course also kills pathogens, and many foods can only be eaten after they have been cooked, so that went hand in hand with greater caloric availability.
In this way, the cultural revolution of the invention of cooking might have gone hand-in-hand with the physical evolution of the enlargement of the human brain.
Source(s): _New Scientist_ “Every human culture includes cooking – this is how it began,” Graham Lawton, Nov 2016, citing work by Richard Wrangham. _Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives_, Oxford UP, 2010, p 151, Wenda Trevathan, citing work by Gail Kennedy.
