You like to cook your food right? I mean were not animals. Well that might actually be what separates us from animals, that we cook our food instead of eating it raw. Eating raw food not only takes longer to chew, but also requires more calories to process that raw food then cooked does. A new theory now states that we owe our intelligence to our ancestors who accidentally learned to cook food.
Harvard Professor Richard Wrangham thinks that it is not so much a change in the ingredients of our diet, but the way in which we prepare them that has caused the radical evolution of our species. “I think cooking is arguably the biggest increase in the quality of the diet in the whole of the history of life. Our ancestors most probably dropped food in fire accidentally. They would have found it was delicious and that set us off on a whole new direction.” he says.
Without cooking, an average person would have to eat around five kilos of raw food to get enough calories to survive. The daily amount of fruit and vegetables would mean a six-hour chewing marathon. The website that I got this was at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8543906.stm it has a great video about this new theory that gives even more information on the subject.
1 Response to “Did We Become Smart By Accident?”
This is totally weird! I always wondered why humans were so much smarter, and advanced than any other species. However, it’s interesting to think that cooking food made such a big impact. It grosses me out thinking about eating raw food though. That would be disgusting if we had to eat raw food all the time…simply unsatisfying. I give whoever accidentally cooked food props. I was reading up on this, and I found a website that talks about the differences of people who are vegetarians, or eat a lot of uncooked food. I thought it was really interesting. Here’s the website..check it out.
http://www.living-foods.com/articles/rawfreshproduce.html