![]() ![]() Unlike the baboons from the wowo myth, our brains have tripled in size over the past 1.5 million years, which wouldn’t have been possible without cooking. Our bodies and brains have evolved in response to a cooked diet, as well as earlier increases in meat consumption and the use of tools to cut up food. ![]() Our ancestors didn’t have access to such luxuries, and therefore would have been even less healthy on a purely raw diet. By contrast, people on raw food diets are often malnourished and underweight, even when eating energy-rich foods shipped from all around the world. Great apes, which can serve as partial models for extinct hominins, also prefer cooked carrots, potatoes and meat over their raw counterparts. ![]() For these reasons alone, hominins could have preferred to eat cooked food without understanding the physiological benefits. Starchy foods break down and become soft when cooked, making them sweeter and easier to chew and digest. Cooking is a way to predigest food, increase calorie uptake and eliminate dangerous pathogens. ‘Cooking made us human,’ as the biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham put it in his book Catching Fire (2010). It’s the primary function of fire in hunter-gatherer societies, followed by warmth, ritual, processing materials, light, preserving food, and protecting against parasites and predators. Cooking is a central aspect of all cultures, and has been for a long time. It’s such an essential and universal behaviour that we could be called Homo coquens – the cooking human. The wowo myth illustrates the most important function of fire for humans: cooking. This means that examining the way nonhuman animals interact with and live alongside fire can help us shed light on how our long-extinct ancestors managed this dangerous phenomenon, and how it went on to shape the creatures we are today. Evidence is mounting that other animals are capable of pyrocognition, the behavioural and cognitive abilities required to harness the potential of fire. Yet it seems humans weren’t alone in our use of fire. Indeed, whoever and whenever and wherever they were, the people that first controlled fire were probably already accustomed to it consuming the savannah vegetation on its own. Wildfires would have been a frequent occurrence for these hominins, a group that encompasses all species in our lineage closer to us than chimpanzees. The earliest evidence for human use of fire dates back to eastern Africa 1.5 million years ago, long before the Chaga say that people cultivated bananas and domesticated goats. The Chaga myth is more plausible, capturing the transformative role of fire in human evolution and culture. Origin stories about fire from around the world involve foragers discovering the hidden spirit of fire in trees, heroes transforming into animals to trick selfish fire-keepers, or Promethean thieves stealing fire from deities. This is the story of how all lands learned to use wowo, according to the Chaga people of eastern Africa. ![]() Visitors to the region wondered why the food here tasted so sweet, and were told they could buy the secret in exchange for a goat. People began making fire deliberately to toast bananas, with the same delightful result. In their hunger, the villagers tried eating the charred bananas left in the ashes – and were surprised to find how sweet they were. The elders arrived and became angry, because this magic had consumed all the grass and trees. The kids added more grass to the flames and, as the bonfire grew, it began to whip the air, making a wo-wo-wo-wo sound like a whirlwind. Sparks jumped and landed on the dry grass nearby, making it smoulder. But one day, a group of children began playing with arrows by twirling them against a log, and were surprised to find that the tips became hot and smoke appeared. Like baboons, they gathered food and ate it raw. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |