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Comment by dboreham | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is new. The idea always was that proto-humans had to live in an environment rich with energy dense food (fruit) prior to growing a brain large enough to figure out how to make barbeque. Otherwise you never get to the barbeque capable brain. The whole point of making fire and therefore consuming cooked meat is that now you can migrate to places that don't have abundant sources of energy dense food.

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My interpretation was similar. The carb-sugar diet was never a highlight because it was a given. The article talks about primates that have high carb-sugar diets but doesn't explain why their brains remain so small compared to humans. Maybe they will eventually evolve? Maybe cooked meat / dense protein is the X factor? If so, that takes back to the beginning and highlights protein. It seems reasonable the combination of the two would be important. Protein enables muscle development, human evolution made us exceptionally well-suited for long-distance and endurance travel compared to all other living primates. This further improves are ability to forage and is just an evolutionary winning combination.

My curiosity leads me more towards, are their other primates that had similar / convergent evolution that independently discovered dense protein sources? Is homo sapien really just a path of singular linear "march of progress" evolution? Were there other marches of progress from other primates or any other species that we competed against or merged with? Those kind of questions become more interesting once you realize the diet combination that creates big brains

>about primates that have high carb-sugar diets but doesn't explain why their brains remain so small compared to humans. Maybe they will eventually evolve?

if they have abundant sources of carb-sugar, there would be no selection pressure to evolve in a particular direction.

Don't most evolutionary traits/changes come at times of restrictions? I don't think many traits are developed during times of abundance, it's when there is a shortage and they have to seek out something else; like protein. Or, sometimes it's just natural competition for the share of the abundance. If there where a big brain out competing you for your carbs, you might have to reconsider your dietary options and make substitutes/changes that would have evolutionary implications.

Cooking also increases the energy available from plant matter, particularly starchy tubers.

Interesting, but I've read for a long time, that our humanoid predecessors at some point figured out how to get to bone marrow with tools. That provided the energy dense food as well an evolutionary impetus to develop larger brains to build better tools and handle them better. Fire and the capability to cook were developed much later.

I don’t know how true that is. But I read a theory somewhere that people developed bigger brains when they started eating more fish which contains omega 3s.

Why is it assumed that learning to cooking animals is a necessary hurdle?

When we’re capable of eating animals raw. And bugs and worms etc.

Whereas in order to consume a wider variety of plants, cooking and other more complex perpetrations are absolutely necessary.

If you're quite finished parroting RFK Jr pro-parasitic brain worm talking points not even aboriginal Australians ate their fish and meat raw.

* https://warndu.com/blogs/blog/traditional-aboriginal-food

And we know that because Australian Aborigines have a written history dating back 90,000 (or whatever the number is this week) years.

Midden piles.

Which part of my first comment isn’t factually correct?

The implication that because humans are "capable of eating animals raw" they therefore must do a lot of that (isolated idiots aside).

Actually yeah Australian aborigines have a famously rigorous oral history.

Have to consider meat digestion from a net calorie perspective. Eating raw meat is possible sure. But once you get to dense protein meats like a red meat, your body expends a lot of calories in the act of digesting it raw. Cooking it is like a pre-digestion step and allows your body to digest it with less energy expenditure.

It also probably was helpful for other reasons. You could store cooked meat easier/longer without refrigeration or kill off some of the bacteria and such making it healthier.

Much like today, early humans were indeed capable of eating meat raw.

Also much like today, early humans did not do so if there was a way to cook it.

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