JoshNankivel
4th September 2010, 07:51 PM
I found this book riveting, an exploration of our ancestral humanity from a perspective I had not really considered fully before.
The author is a Harvard anthropologist and brings his own discipline to bear, along with evidence from paleontology, nutrition, and biology/anatomy.
One of the items I found most compelling was the discussion of how cooking allowed our species to evolve reduced teeth, jaws, and digestive systems due to the reduced need for extensive chewing and digestion in order to extract sufficient calories and nutrition from food. The data cited regarding the amount of usable calories from raw vs cooked foods were very compelling, along with the comparisons to modern apes.
Another interesting topic involved how cooking led to more sophisticated cultural evolution and separation of gender roles.
Overall, I found the theory presented to be compelling and it could certainly make some testable predictions. It appears to fit the historical data we have access to very well, with the obvious difficulties of finding preserved soft tissues and markers of cultural evolution in the early dawn of the human species.
-Josh, pmStudent.com
The author is a Harvard anthropologist and brings his own discipline to bear, along with evidence from paleontology, nutrition, and biology/anatomy.
One of the items I found most compelling was the discussion of how cooking allowed our species to evolve reduced teeth, jaws, and digestive systems due to the reduced need for extensive chewing and digestion in order to extract sufficient calories and nutrition from food. The data cited regarding the amount of usable calories from raw vs cooked foods were very compelling, along with the comparisons to modern apes.
Another interesting topic involved how cooking led to more sophisticated cultural evolution and separation of gender roles.
Overall, I found the theory presented to be compelling and it could certainly make some testable predictions. It appears to fit the historical data we have access to very well, with the obvious difficulties of finding preserved soft tissues and markers of cultural evolution in the early dawn of the human species.
-Josh, pmStudent.com