A little recap

  Just as a reminder about the reason I started looking into our ancient history, it was to look at how intertwined our evolution is with our relationship to food. Hopefully, what you've seen over these last few episodes has given you a nice clear picture of how we would still be eating leaves, nuts, fruit and a little meat if it weren't for the food we ate.

  Moving out of the forest to the savannah where we started eating meat helped, but chimps were doing it too so that wan't enough to make the difference, the food had to be cooked. There is evidence of fire being controlled from almost two million years ago and it's fair to say that cooking had caught on by three hundred thousand years ago and that was the game changer.​​​​​​​

Another dish from last night's phenomenal dinner.

  The extra nutrients made available by the cooking process helped our brains grow and our guts shrink. Don't forget that part of our physiological evolution was taking place in other parts of our bodies besides the brain. As our guts didn't have to work as hard to digest, they shrank and as our teeth didn't have to work all day munching raw vegetables, they changed too and our mouths shrank.

  The most significant development was without a doubt our increased brain size. Primates already have notably large brains for their size but humans are larger still and these energy hungry organs were only able to grow because cooking made the process of realising the energy locked up in food a lot easier. It would of me to not put in a little dig at the folk out there who are convinced a raw vegan diet is the way to go. History tells us otherwise. 

  Anyway, once our brains grew, the tools and weapons we had became a lot more sophisticated as did our language skills and societal living. Ultimately, with the advent of farming, we took control of our food source which gave us the ability to become further organised and grow the size of the groups we lived in. Instead of rearing children being a burden on smaller groups, the extra labour provided by the increased population made agriculture easier. Though this was just the start, all of this progress was down to the fact we started cooking.

Think of that when you next get a kebab to eat on the way home.

Kirk out

RevoltingFood.com