Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
Speaker Series lecture by Dr. Richard Wrangham, Professor at Harvard University and co-director of the Kibale Chimpanzee …
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Website dedicated to first-time mothers
Speaker Series lecture by Dr. Richard Wrangham, Professor at Harvard University and co-director of the Kibale Chimpanzee …
source
Fascinating lecture, watching it for the second time now…
Correction : women have been cooking for 1.9 million years – certainly feels like it!
Watched all of it 1:21:06
Fire gave us consciousness–the ability to plan ahead and think abstractly. Fire kept predators away so early man was free from the constant now of survival and was freed to think and plan, while other animals had to always be ready to fight or run. No animal can plan for the future much past 30 minutes. The use of fire was much more a factor in our becoming human than just cooking.
This explains why chef Ramsey always reminded me of a enraged Chimpanzee.
The voice box in humans only travels down deeper into the throat by six months of life. We began to reflect with each other about our surroundings. Our tools came quickly including our body forms.
This lecture blew my mind – in a good way. Dr. Richard's lucid explanations and responses, laced with humor, really put to rest a lot of doubts that I had been struggling with for years, for example the long gap between the time we start to see big anatomical changes in hominids around 2 million years ago and the purported discovery of fire around 500 thousand years ago.
Cooking help human to consume more fiber .. most vegetables/ spices good once it cook well.. cooking is about fiber .. not caloric..
Not really clear on what the raw foodists were eating. How much meat, vegetables etc. That information would be quite informative.
Also I find his emphasis on soft food really bar. Cooks cook to create soft food? Huh!! Celebrations are full of soft foods. Really? Not the ones i go to.
we dont have the volume in our digestive system our ancestors did so we predigest with heat
Very interesting video. I read the book "Catching Fire" and found it fascinating.
Maybe scavenging animals that were killed in a fire, is what led to deliberately cooking over a fire.
Here in 2022 and monkey pox is here
Incredible
No explanation was provided for why RP meat resulted in more weight loss, and CP meat resulted in less weight gain.
Only argument I have is with the belief that the only purpose is to gain energy and convert it into one's own species. Humans seem to have broken that chain. Harmony in general is the real end-goal of life. Harmony first for oneself and then for those the individual includes (in their perception) as members of their tribe.
If I stop cooking, I devolve back into a Neanderthal ?
I am myself of the opinion that indeed cooking made is human, because it made it possible to loose the enormous chewibg muscles so our skull could grow to house the enormous brain made possible by the greater intake of proteĂ¯nes
56:25 Modern processed baby food quite obviously has no relation to ancestral/evolutionary infant nutrition.
36:00 Dr. Wrangam discusses egg digestibility in ileostomy patients. I've actually read this study closely and I believe the authors of the study drew the incorrect conclusion. Their data show that egg yolks were better digested raw and that whites were better digested cooked. One possible explanation is due to the fact that the major proteins in egg white include ovalbumin and ovomucoid which are the major cause of egg allergies and poor digestion of egg. These are not found in raw egg yolk. Denaturing these proteins is likely to increase digestibility but denaturing protein in general has not been shown to confer any such benefit.
More generally, raw animal protein digestion is likely to be energetically preferable (in the absence of pathogens) since useful structures can be absorbed and used without modification. Many human cultures have traditions involving the consumption of raw animal meat such as sushi and sashimi in Japan or steak tartare in Western Europe. I believe meat cooking is primarily an anti-pathogen technology aimed primarily at food preservation (a major element of many food cultures, involving the use of spices and salts) and secondarily at pathogen decontamination.
11:55 lecture starts
Was fire discovered independently around the globe or was it spread down from a single invention?
Answer: My ancestor invented it.