Did fermented foods fuel brain growth?
news.harvard.edu
news.harvard.edu
Everyone knows about standard types of yogurt and pickles and whatnot - there is a whole world of legume ferments (mainly beans) that use much more 'advanced' types of microorganisms. Examples would be things like Natto from Japan mentioned in the article (using Bacillus Subtilis). Unlike the simple yeasts that break down milk sugars in yogurt and produce various organic acids (like acetic acid for example) the bacteria in Natto can consume the resistant starch in beans and produce short chain fatty acids like Butyrate (very beneficial for health) AND can break down the complete protein in soybeans into their constituent amino acids. I believe Natto originally came about because cooked and cooled soybeans were then wrapped in rice leaves for transport and Bacillus Subtilis happens to naturally live on those leaves.
It is also really unfortunate that in the west we miss out on tons of fungi based foods (not talking about anything psychedelic here) as many mushrooms contain tons of prebiotic fiber like substances that feed the probiotics already found in our gut.
You're right that we get far fewer varieties of fermented foods. It's notable how certain cultures go very far in some directions, like how many types of lentils/legumes are used commonly in India, and how many types of chilis are used in single dishes in Mexico. Japan's in that direction for fermentation, perhaps.
French cuisine deeply relies on mushrooms for umami and richness. There's a rich mushroom culture in France - a bunch of varietals are used.
I think we're going to eventually come to a point where we consider fermentation a sort of "food group". Many cultures had cheese, yogurt, kimchi pretty much every day - the probiotic benefits are great.
At the very least, being able to eat a variety of (fermented) foods in winter must have reduced the monotonous dreariness of the season - and helped improve nutrition, too.
The interesting part to me is the first person who tried the fermented food or the animal meat that fell into the ocean and brined.
And I bet there was plenty of work to do anyway, even in winter in places where it is cold and dark, enough that hunger is still a more likely motivator than boredom. I'd be interested to see hard facts on this, though.
Speaking of what I know, there are plenty of fungi-based dishes in Europe. Mushrooms are a staple of many traditional recipes. Mushrooms that can't be conveniently farmed are rare in cities, but they are certainly not rare "in the west".
I am not convinced that fermented food helped as much as meat.
It makes absolutely no chronological sense to assume fermented foods to have been in our diet before meat, and has been theorized already that our brain size was only possible thanks to eating highly caloric fat and protein from animals. Imagine how much time we'd have wasted just feeding on grass and roots just to have enough energy to maintain our massive brain.
Though it's hard to say in evolution whether the chicken or the egg came first, it's pretty simple: scavenge meat left from predators, enormous amount of caloric surplus, which concurrently enables expanded brain and a lot of "free time" not spent thinking about food, time that could be spent creating tools to make feeding even easier. The rest is history.
This is also the reason human babies are so helpless: our brains are so large and energy-intensive that it takes years after birth for it to finally develop.
A video of a deer catching and eating a bird went around a while back.
I thought it was obvious the egg came before the chicken because: dinosaurs. ;)
Roots in particular are pretty energy dense have a pretty high roi, I think you have this backwards.
Hunting often comes up short, and isn’t big game every time a group goes out.
The “anti-meat” framing is reflective of more of a personal bias that has already come to conclusions. Realistically a number of things were likely happening concurrently. Fermentation is a spontaneous process, and would have happened to any number of scavenged/foraged foods.
Let alone the fact that most roots are toxic or contain anti nutrients, as seeds do.
>Let alone the fact that most roots are toxic or contain anti nutrients, as seeds do.
Nonsense meme not grounded in any actual hard data. Anyone observing hunter gatherer populations notes that significant quantities of root vegetables are consumed, outside of populations living in abnormally harsh conditions (e.g. the arctic)
What really helped humans I think is more their morphology, their incredibly precise hands
- Noma is the obvious (expensive) choice and the author of an eponymous fermentation book.
- Silo in London is a lesser-known restaurant that does a lot of in-house lacto fermentation and garums
If you have any other to add, please to comment.
(I specify "modern" because a lot of traditional cuisines incorporate fermentation, such as kimchi, sauerkraut or even koji in soy sauce)
Noma has gone through multiple "Versions", and with every major version change they publish a book. So, we can at least hope for a cool book in 2025.
I found one of his books [0] more accessible or beginner friendly than the Noma book.
So purposeful fermentation might have played a role, just like fire, and hunting, and gathering techniques, and farming. It probably wasn't a revolutionary and sudden change, but gradual developments.
It's easy because it's exactly where we are now. Strip mining natural resources, runaway climate- and ecological change. And no way to solve it.
First, let's say you have two brains, one has IQ 160, the other has IQ 60. They are the same volume, neither suffers any brain damage. What is the IQ 60 brain doing?
Honestly, it seems like the Flynn effect has been a disaster upon the human race, when you look a bit better into history. People did live happier lives. All the supposed horrors seem to be a myth. There was more peace, love, honesty and goodness. Maybe they did know better.
It doesn't seem like "a hump" but more like a fundamental law of nature: exponential growth will collapse. And do so violently and with chaos.
I'm not talking about "the next 25 years" but more hundreds of years. Though even the timeline makes me anxious lately. I might see parts of civilization collapse due to exponential growth hitting a roof.
Because it certainly is a threat to economic growth. And also a threat to "national" safety if you decline, but your neighbor grows.
But it's undeniable that, on global, and millennial scale, exponential growth is unsustainable.
Our genes code for proteins which are expressed in different quantities and have different effects on multiple parts of our biology and growth that lead to operational differences in our brains that lead to patterns that might be considered "smarter" in some circumstances and is beneficial in some environments.
Take, for example, something near and dear to many of us on HN, hyperfocus.
Is being prone to hyperfocus on subjects that interest us making us "smarter"? Is it "beneficial"?
Well, sometimes, in some ways, in some environments. If you can hyperfocus on something that has economic value in a safe environment, you can make a lot of money and be very successful. If the things you want to hyperfocus on aren't particularly useful or you end up neglecting your actual job or relationships because of it, or if you're a caveman who was supposed to be keeping an eye out for lions and not counting how many leaves are on different kinds of plants, you'll be less successful.
Greater neuron density is probably still possible though. Just need to evolve to normalize the greater nutrient requirements.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-i...
The future belongs to the individuals, on any species, that are best adapted towards reproducing. Human beings are just another animal subjected to natural selection pressures. It seems that, usually, if you have too high of an IQ you simply refuse to have kids.
Convert the parking garage in the basement into a day care and you'll have phd-level employees for life. Changing jobs for even double the pay would be completely unaffordable.
The negative correlation between education and family size is a function of the cost of raising children in a city. If the cost is reduced then the correlation becomes nuetral or even positive. There is no such correlation in a rural setting. This is a bottleneck in the talent pipeline.
Consider this paper (from Indonesia) in which concluded that the relationship can change over time, as a function of policy:
Think of a high IQ man in the late 1700. He can see that having children incurs enormous costs, both financially, emotionally, in terms of time, freedom etc. He can choose to never marry, and just keep being a womanizer. He may have LOTS of unrecognized offspring, that are very hard to be attributed to him, and so pass his genes along. He just want to have sex, reproducing is not at all in his mind. Sex is good and he likes it, so he does it. That's the trick nature plays in order to make 1700 man to pass his genes.
Now in the 21st century, basically no high IQ man would go around having unprotected sex, since the costs associated nowadays are still enormous, probably even more so than 300 years ago, and today those costs are easily enforceable through the judicial system. So 21st century high IQ man, on average, will have a LOT less children than he used to have in the past. Sex is still good, and he will have a lot of it. But now nature's trick stopped working. The sex drive per se is not effective anymore when coupled with a high capacity brain that wants to avoid the costs of having to care for another human beings. So, this trait, high IQ, will be selected out of the gene pool over time.
In the case of high IQ women it's the same story. In the past, with a lot less effective and readily available contraceptive methods, smart women were probably a lot more at risk of having unexpected pregnancies. Nowadays, unexpected pregnancies are basically an IQ test for women.
edit: I searched a little bit on this and it seems that it was just a myth propagated by movies and a few very famous cases, i.e. Ted Bundy. But anyway, I do not see how you can make an argument from I wrote on the original post implying a correlation between psycopathy and high IQ. Is it the avoiding of having children, since it's an effective burden on the prospective father? It's just a fact, sexual drive was enough to make a man reproduce in the past. Not anymore. Natural selection wins again, the rules of the game changed, so you're out.
Really, the only two countries that are combining a knowledge economy with an expanding population are Israel and India, both of which essentially have a tech-worker economy subsidizing and intermarrying with a bronze-age economy. That seems like the likely actual solve, a few ivory tower cities surrounded by amish country. Every now and then an Amish tests into the cities or a city-zen absconds to a simpler life, but the net flow is generally intellectual country types moving into the tech hubs.
> The problem with this theory is that the earliest evidence places the use of fire at approximately 1.5 million years ago — significantly later than the development of the hominid brain.
but this, isn't really a problem. evidence != truth, its always pushed back upon new findings, and its sensible to assume we will never know the true date, but we will definitely know it was earlier than our best evidence.
nonetheless, that million year difference is a whammy. that's a lot of time for divergence and development of just a single organ.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know/farmer-ants-a...
Crows use cars to break open nuts they would otherwise not be able to eat; eagles drop turtles to break their shell.
> We will sort through thousands of tiny berries carefully, to make sure we don't eat something unpleasant
When orkas kill sharks, they only eat the liver of the shark and leave the rest alone. Wild civets also choose only the best coffee berries, which is part of why we make coffee from their poop.
> We will go hungry even when edible food is around, because we know it will be even more ripe later.
I don't think we go hungry, we just look for better food elsewhere until that edible food is fully ripened.
do you need examples of that? do you have a GPT4 subscription?
- Fire : cooking
- Farming
- Meat
- Tools usage
Possible things that may had impact on brain development.
I don't need an excuse to enjoy sauerkraut, but it doesn't hurt. Guten Appetit, everyone!
Is the process of rotting also part fermentation?
(God, I hope this doesn't start a new fad of eating rotting meat, among the Paleo dieters).
I recently had Vietnamese fermented pork: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nem_chua
But, it really is almost impossible to draw a clear line around fermentation that doesn't include something someone considers rot. "Controlled spoilage" is definitely a useful way to think about fermentation and it is still spoilage.
And if you ask the northern people and some in Africa, aged fish is a delicacy.
Aged means controlled rot. Pretty much like fermentation for cabbage etc.
Kombucha, for example, requires oxygen and is mostly an aerobic fermentation. In order to carbonate, however, it goes through a short anaerobic step at the end (which also causes it to switch from producing organic acids to producing alcohol). This is usually done during the bottling process since the bottle is sealed.