About the first caveman who came up with an idea that food should be cooked
We will never know his/her name, but the fact is that humans, in prehistory, ate raw food, then started to cook. Well, I know all benefits and changes in human's organism that came with cooking, but someone had to do that first. Now, I keep asking myself:
- How that person came up with that idea at all?
First, we must consider few facts for better understanding the situation.
It is proved that Homo erectus controlled and used the fire 400 000 year ago in the Middle Paleolithic.
There are some theories that fire was controlled and much before, but those theories were never proved. But some analysis in Wonderwerk Cave (South Africa) proved that some bones and plants were cooked 2 million years ago. But most of the scientist don't agree with that.
If humans wanted to cook, first they needed to learn is to control the fire.
So, let's take this theory that humans started do control the fire 400 000 year ago. But it became widespread 125 000 years ago. Well, it is not hard to understand that. Today, if I find or discover something new, all I need is to press ENTER and the whole world will know about that. But it was very different in Paleolithic.
Every human discovery started with an individual.
He had an idea or it was just accidental discovery. And if that one individual didn't learn how to control fire, some other individual would learn it, but the time distance between those two individuals could be thousands of years. And how many thousands of year needed to pass to make that discovery trending?
Fire allowed humans to fight with cold so they started to lose their body hair. They made torches and started to move by nights. And started to cook food. But, why, after millions of years of evolution and enjoying raw food, they started to cook at all?
It could happen that they were playing with fire and accidentally burned the forest.
When the fire died, they walked trough burned forest and found many burned animals. They tried the roast meat for the first time and it wasn't so tough and hard as raw meat. They liked that and started to cook, bake and boil.
Maybe that happened, but we will never know. It is possible that humans started to cook on different sides of the world with different reasons and they found different discoveries about it.
But I think that the most important step was boiling the water.
Humans probably started to boil water before they started to cook.
They were doing that to warm themselves in very cold ages. So, someone dropped a piece of food in that pot. It was a piece of meat, or some roots, or vegetables. And all inhabitants of that cave gathered around the pot to see what will happen. And when the food changed the color, they tried to eat it and - it was delicious. So, humans in that cave started to cook first and, again, how many thousands of years had to pass to make this trending?
And that discovery started to change our organism drastically.
Cooking of food improved health of humans. Cooking releases more nutrients in the food and kills parasites. So, they started to live longer. And they didn't waste all energy on chewing and digesting. They could eat food which they couldn't eat before they started to cook. That could be the reason of human's brain expansion. But it is surely the reason why our digesting tract became shorter. And more sensitive, because today we can't even consider to eat things that they were eating a half million years ago.
Today we have recipes, different styles of cooking, different ways of preparing food, all depends on which point of the globe you are positioned. And we have those actions and movements that suggest to us to eat only raw fruits. So, soon we can expect that they will try to make us to live on the trees again.
Thanks to The Flintstones and historymadeeveryday.wordpress.com for the pictures!
Good post. Thought provoking.
I will disagree on the 'boiling water' before cooking. They had no way of boiling water even with a fire. The best I have heard is heating rocks and putting them in puddle but i doubt that was likely as they were still primitive and moving scalding rocks would be difficult.
Or
I also heard they used the intestines of animals to hold over a fire filled with water. This is probable but I'd bet they learned to cook before boiling water in guts first.
That's just my thoughts on that. ^^
I'll second this. Native American tribes did a lot of "ponch" cooking. That is boiling water in the hide of an animal using hot rocks. When we are talking about evolution and cavemen though, Native Americans are like spacemen to our paleolithic ancstors. There is a lot of evidence that cavemen ate the stomach contents of ruminants, that is deer, sheep etc.... like a salad with vinegar.
@Dumar022 is spot on with the cooking food though. I am under the belief that there were great forest fires that burned animals, and once they tried cooked meat, they only had to harness the fire, and our path along the evolutionary trail was forever blazed.
interesting, thank you @cavemanrob
and now i just thought. Imagine being the first man, it would be man, to burn himself with boiling water.
Maybe, these all are theories. Great comment, thank you
But there is undeniably the trend to go back to raw food again, as it indeed seems healthier. I myself did a raw food phase for a few weeks, and the effects are amazing!
I think cooking served 3 reasons:
1 and 2 are not so necessary anymore in today's civilized world. Water from the tap is mostly clean. And we're often too fat and don't move around a lot anyway, so we don't have to compress calories.
And about 3, there's this trend towards vegetarianism and veganism.
Maybe they started cooking when they first smelled Dinosaur freshly charred by lightening or lava?
Humans control the fire.
No other animal does.
Today.
Some Primates use tools.
Corvids use tools, have a language.
Pass information between generations.
Only Humans have the fire.