There’s also some recent evidence / claims that cooking (and meat eating) were in part responsible for the big jump in human brain size and intelligence.
That is interesting. I was aware that cooking opened up a whole new world of plant foods to us—most of our neolithic vegetable staples are indegistable or even poisonous until cooked. I was not aware that cooking significantly increases meat digestability. Although raw meats still seem much more digestable than raw neolithic staples. You can’t eat raw grains or potatoes, for example.
Regardless of what other selection pressures may have been driving us towards larger brains, it’s clear that hunting and cooking provided the resource advantage to support the quick increase. I imagine that the growth in complexity of language, culture and technology drove the selection effect.
It’s interesting though that our hominid brains rapidly expanded up to about 100-200 billion neurons (the latter only in our larger brained neandrathal cousins) and then stopped. This is about the same upper neuron count we see in elephants and cetaceans.
There’s also some recent evidence / claims that cooking (and meat eating) were in part responsible for the big jump in human brain size and intelligence.
That is interesting. I was aware that cooking opened up a whole new world of plant foods to us—most of our neolithic vegetable staples are indegistable or even poisonous until cooked. I was not aware that cooking significantly increases meat digestability. Although raw meats still seem much more digestable than raw neolithic staples. You can’t eat raw grains or potatoes, for example.
Regardless of what other selection pressures may have been driving us towards larger brains, it’s clear that hunting and cooking provided the resource advantage to support the quick increase. I imagine that the growth in complexity of language, culture and technology drove the selection effect.
It’s interesting though that our hominid brains rapidly expanded up to about 100-200 billion neurons (the latter only in our larger brained neandrathal cousins) and then stopped. This is about the same upper neuron count we see in elephants and cetaceans.