Cooking evolved culturally and reshaped human digestive anatomy and function

Evidence

Of all these techniques, cooking is probably the most important piece of cultural know-how that has shaped our digestive system. The primatologist Richard Wrangham has persuasively argued that cooking (and therefore fire) has played a crucial role in human evolution. Richard and his collaborators laid out how cooking, if done properly, does an immense amount of digestion for us. It softens and prepares both meat and plant foods for digestion. The right amount of heating tenderizes, detoxifies, and breaks down fibrous tubers and other plant foods. Heating also breaks down the proteins in meat, dramatically reducing the work for our stomach acid. Consequently, by contrast with meat-eating carnivores (e.g., lions), we do not often retain meat in our stomachs for hours, because it typically arrives partially digested by pounding, scraping, marinating, and cooking. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 224

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the broader framework of self-domestication and gene-culture coevolution argued throughout the book; also connects to nardoo/leaching example earlier in this same chapter. — connects to: Human digestive organs are dramatically undersized for our body compared to other primates — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 221; Culture-driven cooking let natural selection shrink gut tissue to fund bigger brains — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 233; Culturally transmitted skills created selection pressures shaping human anatomy and physiology — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 313 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Culture-driven cooking let natural selection shrink gut tissue to fund bigger brains #expands (0.97) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 233
• Culturally transmitted skills created selection pressures shaping human anatomy and physiology #corroborates (0.88) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 313
• Humans are biologically dependent on cooked food and cannot survive long without it #expands (0.82) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 230
• Cultural tools replaced anatomy, so natural selection weakened human bodies #complicates (0.78) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 235
• Humans increasingly control and redesign their own evolved biological systems #expands (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 186