![]() Darren CurnoeĪt the famous site of Zhoukoudian near Beijing Davidson Black claimed way back in the 1930s that Homo erectus had cooked its food hundreds of thousands of years ago. In Israel, at the site of Gesher Benot Ya `aqov, burned seeds, wood and flint are all argued to be evidence for the control of fire nearly 790,000 years ago.Įxcavations at Zhoukoudian during 2014 being conducted by members of the Chinese Academy of Science. More recent evidence from Wonderwork Cave in South Africa provides a much stronger case for hominin fire use by about 1 million years ago. The earliest claimed evidence goes back to least 1.4 million years ago in Kenya at an archaeological site called Chesowanja in the form of burnt clay.īut this is controversial and a range of natural causes such as lightning strikes on trees could have caused similar signs. The archaeological evidence for the controlled use of fire and cooking is surprisingly thin on the ground and highly contested. Molecular clocks even suggest that human specific tapeworms evolved at least 100,000 years ago and perhaps as early as 1.7 million years ago when meat eating and cooking may have begun. The only other mammals to be definitive hosts for tapeworms are carnivores. Yet, surprisingly, we humans are the only species of primate that is a definitive host for several of these tapeworms meaning they can’t reproduce without being eaten and hosted in the human body. These directly reflect differences in our diet: humans rely heavily on nutritionally dense and easy to digest foods like grains and animal foods rather than a diet based entirely on raw foods dominated by plant matter.Īnother interesting facet of the human diet is the relationship we have with parasites like tapeworms.Įach year millions of people around the world are infested by one or more of the 20 species of human tapeworms through eating undercooked or raw meat from cattle, sheep, pigs and other sources. Similarly, the large intestine (colon) of other apes is about 45% of total gut volume but only about 20% in humans. Our small intestine represents almost 60% of our total gut volume, whereas in other great apes it’s around 15-30%. Our guts also reflect the food preferences of our ancestors. The foraging strategy of human hunter-gatherers seems to have involved a focus on difficult to obtain but high reward foods, requiring sophisticated cognitive, cultural and social skills. The controlled use of fire and cooking of food must have been evolutionary game changers, being spectacular examples of niche construction.Īnthropologists like Richard Wrangham have argued that cooking probably even began more than 2 million years ago and may have played a key role in major changes such as a life permanently on the ground and our large bodies and brains. When a species alters its environment and influences its own evolution, becomes a ‘co-director’ if you will, the process is dubbed ‘niche construction’. Such interactions shape ecosystems over long time scales and are profoundly important in terms of evolution. Yet, all species influence their environment through the normal ecological interactions that occur in every ecosystem, such as between predators and their prey. So much of what we read about human evolution portrays the protagonists as unwitting players in a game of chance: natural selection acting through external environmental factors beyond their control and sealing their evolutionary fate. ![]() In the latest episode of my UNSWTV video series ‘How did we get here?’, I take a light hearted look at the role diet has played in our evolution.Įpisode 6 of my UNSWTV Series ‘How did we get here?’ explores the importance of cooking in our evolution. Yet, few of us pause to reflect on the hugely important role diet plays in the ecology and evolutionary history of all species, including our own. ![]() These shows celebrate the remarkable lengths we humans will go to to whet the appetite, stimulate the senses, fire our neural reward systems and sustain the body. Amateur cook-offs like the hugely popular MasterChef series now in its seventh season in Australia have been part of our TV diet for almost two decades.
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