Reddit reviews Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Pretty funny, since there's actually some evidence for the opposite argument: that cooking makes food more nutritious, and it's a major reason humans have been so successful. Raw food is the ultimate Luddite movement, trying to take us back so far we're not even sapient any more.

Food For Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Raw food isn't good for you. You should read Richard Wrangham's book Catching Fire, it goes into detail about how raw food isn't healthy for the human body.

Except that phaseolids contain lectins as well as other indigestible and potentially harmful compounds.

While cooking doesn't necessarily take indigestible foods and make them digestible, it does, as you mentioned, aid in digestion, allowing for less energy to be consumed in the digestive process so, the caloric yield of eating cooked foods would be higher.

Check out Catching Fire and Beans

Have you read 'Catching Fire'? It's a book about cooking and its role in human evolution. I've found it an interesting, informative and fun read.

About plants being not very hard to eat... well, most grains are quite coarse in their natural state, but if you are able to cook them into porridge, you can get a lot of protein and fats out of them.

Humans did not eat exclusively raw food in nature. The consumption of cooked food makes the food 'easier' for our bodies to process. While the total nutritional volume is decreased slightly, this ease of processing results in a higher bio-availability of nutrients than by eating raw food. Put simply, we get more nutrients out of cooked food than raw food, even though raw food has more nutrients, because it is easier for our bodies to process.

This reduced the amount of time our ancestors had to spend foraging and grazing considerably. Our nearest ape cousins spend upwards of eight hours per day consuming food, because the lower bioavailibility of raw food means they have to keep eating and eating and eating to meet their bodies needs. Our ancestors using fire and cooking foods allowed us to reduce that time to between one and two hours, allowing us more time as a species for other pursuits. These include tool making, social interaction, the development of more complex languages, culture, trade and so on. There's a book you may want to read on the matter:

https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/1469298708

This book is for a general audience, but check out Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wranghum. His theories are controversial, but plausible in my non-expert opinion.

>But Homo Erectus we think is the first hominid that controlled fire which is about 1 million to 1.5 million years ago! And then people learned to make fire.

It's on my reading list. https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/1469298708

But here is one example from Ötzi - https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/26/world/europe/bolzano-italy-iceman-south-tyrol-museum-of-archaeology.html

>Then he left, fully provisioned with food, the embers of a fire preserved in maple leaf wrappings inside a birch-bark cylinder

I don't have much philosophical background, but one thing I'd like to point out is that the moral boundaries we set are absolutely tied to what is practical.

In an ideal world, we would let every living retain all their freedoms; they can do whatever they want and would never have to suffer. No person, cow, or bacterium would be killed. The problem is that certain rights that some living things have will hinder the rights of others. Until very recently in human history, we could not survive without eating other animals ^[source]. We also can't help but kill millions of bacteria left and right regardless of the choices we make, since the normal behavior of bacteria (multiply if you can) basically assumes that a good number of them will die. In fact, we can't really compute which of our actions would kill the least number of bacteria without devoting our own lives to this task.

Practicality manifests itself in more subtle ways in our ever-changing morality as well. Modern medicine would have never gotten a start without rather cruel experiments centuries ago. We now have machines that automate dangerous tasks (defusing bombs) or make them much safer (building tall things). For all of these kinds of tasks, the original way of doing things is now immoral or unethical simply because there is a much better way to do it.

If we somehow lost all our technology tomorrow, would we sit around and do nothing claiming that doing anything is unsafe? No, we would continue to build bridges in the old, dangerous fashion while we search for ways to make it safer in the future. Similarly, once we find a way to adequately teach biology and medical students anatomy without using real animals, dissecting live frogs will probably become unethical rather than standard practice.

If you believe in evolution, you believe that we gradually evolved from organisms similar to bacteria, and that there is no quantum jump at any point in evolution. This means that moral boundaries that we draw are inherently arbitrary and based on practical concerns. This doesn't mean that the lines we do draw are unnecessary or invalid. This just means that we should remind ourselves that everything we do is in context of our own perspective and our own current situation as a society. There is no absolute moral line that will stand the stand the test of time other than that living things should be allowed what they want as much as possible.

Well one obvious advantage to eating cooked rather than raw meat is that it vastly reduces parasite issues. Anyways, I haven't read the book but it's here:

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

The ability to harness fire predates humans. Evidence for the control of fire dates back 350,000 - 1.2 million years. I recommend reading the raw and the stolen, or the novel by the same scientist catching fire.

If the control of fire predates humans, then who first harnessed fire? Very likely it was homo erectus. H. erectus lived in small nomadic hunter-gatherer bands. They made, modified, and used stone tools. They may have had proto-languages or gestural languages. They were the first hominin species to migrate out of Africa and into Eurasia. They even made it as far as China, Vietnam, and Indonesia. They were excellent at adapting to new environments.

The evidence for control of fire is limited, and found sporadically throughout H. erectus's territory. This either means they all were able to control fire, but evidence isn't always left behind. Or that only certain populations of H. erectus controlled fire. While trade and transfer of ideas between populations was slow, it wasn't non-existent. Ideas, innovations, discoveries from one group could slowly make their way to another, and another, and another. Perhaps H. erectus knew how to use fire to their advantage, but not all populations knew how to harness it, maintain, or transport it.

Either way by the time humans arrived on scene, 200,000 years ago, the control and use of fire was more likely ubiquitous across human populations. Humans had become adapted to a cooked food diet, and fire was a very likely an important part of our early survival. So while H. erectus may have only used fire when it was available (e.g. through lightning strike), early humans appear to have used, harnessed, and maintained it.

As to how they might have harnessed, transported, or started fire is anyones guess. Their are any number of successful techniques they might have used. For example, you can keep fires going by storing the hot coals and reigniting the fire later with dry fuel. Like so many human discoveries/innovations they were likely by accident, or through trial and error.

Unlike most depictions of early Homo, they didn't all live in caves. Caves just happen to be really good at preserving remains, and artifacts. However, there have been key discoveries that show that early Homo species, including early Humans did not always live in caves, but made structures (like tipis or yurts).