Cooking Is The Cause Of Evolution

Video: Cooking Is The Cause Of Evolution

Video: Cooking Is The Cause Of Evolution
Video: Why Do We Cook? 2024, December
Cooking Is The Cause Of Evolution
Cooking Is The Cause Of Evolution
Anonim

Man's ardent thirst for perfecting his culinary skills is the reason for the evolution of our brain, scientists say. Cooking has helped humanity develop its potential, contributing to the emergence of culture and different religions. This revolutionary discovery is the work of a team of Brazilian professors.

According to them, the cooking process has provided people with a very efficient way to deliver calories to neurons, which in turn has allowed the human brain to grow.

A team study led by Susanna Herculano of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro found that three of the early human species, Paranthropus boisei, Homo erectus and Australopithecus afarensis, spent more than 7 hours a day chewing the raw food they ate.. In this way, they maintained their functions, but lost too much time in performing this activity.

Cooking is thought to have been discovered 1.8 million years ago by Homo erecktus, the ancestor of modern man.

Mother with children in the kitchen
Mother with children in the kitchen

It is the heat treatment of food that significantly reduces the time for eating, and through the time gained, a person begins to spend more time on communication and all those creative activities that make today's world as we know it.

Brazilian scientists compare the metabolic needs of today's great apes to very early human species. Gorillas, for example, reach the maximum size of their brains by consuming raw food. They spend almost 10 hours eating.

If the brains of gorillas correspond to only 2 percent of their body (as in humans), they must spend another two hours eating. The conclusion from this comparison is that without cooking our brains might have been at the level of our primitive ancestors.

Through the development of human cooking skills, the human mind has evolved to infinite limits. Heat treatment has allowed an increase in calorie intake due to easier chewing of food and processing by the body, the team concluded.

Recommended: