ANTH 3342 Lecture 2: 1-23-2017 How Cooking Made Us Human
8 Feb 2017
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Document Summary
Diet is important to understanding organisms and their behavior. Humans are good at eating food that they have processed themselves. Humans are perfectly capable of eating raw food. Can humans live on raw food alone: as the percentage of food that a woman eats raw nearing 100, they menstruate less amenorrhea(?) Because we have very small guts, small chewing teeth. We are biologically adapted to eating cooked food. We have a narrower ribcage than australopithecus, their larger gut was meant to hold a larger gut, h. erectus evolved with smaller gut and narrower ribcage. Tooth molar sized dropped between h. habilis(larger teeth) to h. erectus(smaller teeth) Why cooking matters: add water convention a way to assess the caloric value of our foods, add water convention ignores the effects of food processing. The relationship between gut size and brain size in humans, primarily fruit-eating apes, and primarily leaf-eating apes. Cooking food allows for additional energy to go to our brains.
