After conducting experiments on the preferences of
"semi-free-ranging" chimpanzees when presented with cooked food, Felix
Warneken and Alexandra G. Rosati [1] suggested that: "The transition to a
diet of cooked foods – involving the use of heat in food preparation – was a
fundamental change for our species." This point was taken up in an article
by Pallab Ghosh, the BBC Science Correspondent [2]:
According to Dr Warneken [and Dr
Rosati], his experiments show that most of the mental skills needed to cook
were there in human ancestors between 5 to 7 million years ago and so all it
took for the first emergence of the culinary arts was the controlled use of
fire and the ability to trust other people not to pinch our food while our back
was turned..
..The motivation for the study was
to investigate a controversial theory that cooking was necessary for human brains
to become larger. The idea by the primatologist Prof Richard Wrangham.. ..is
that cooking enabled our ancestors to eat more protein, which helped our
ancestors develop their brains.
The BBC article went on to include extracts from an
interview with Professor Fred Spoor of UCL:
Cooking did not happen until
300,000 to 400,000 years ago. That is late in 7 million years of human
evolution, so to put it bluntly, who cares that early humans may have liked the
idea of cooked food?..
..Substantially larger brains initially
emerge around 1.5 million years ago and a major leap was around 500,000 years
ago.
The series of quotes led me to think about how humans developed
their unique position in the Animal Kingdom, with the power to manipulate the environment
to an extent quite unlike that of any other organism. I dismiss the Creationist
argument that humans resulted from the invention of a supernatural force and accept
that our extraordinary capacities evolved from the nucleus of possibility in
our ape-like ancestors. It was the phrase "the ability to trust other
people not to pinch our food while our back was turned" that had me
wondering about an explanation.
Let's assume our distant ancestors lived in family groups
and that they foraged for food, gathering vegetable material and hunting
animals, all of which were eaten without cooking, as this method of food
preparation had yet to be discovered. Families are closely related genetically
and the survivorship of individuals, and thus their "selfish genes",
will have been enhanced if the hunters were successful in providing plentiful
food to ensure the survival of all individuals. Let's assume further that hunters
from several families joined together to make hunting more efficient and make
the capture of larger prey possible. Interactions between members of this larger
group would have required signals – vocalisations, movements of limbs, and
facial expressions – that had evolved to give clearly understood information.
After years of successful co-operative hunting, what if one
group of individuals gave the signal to co-operate, but then took the catch for
themselves, maybe killing some individuals in other families to ensure plenty
for their own family at a low cost? The signals no longer have their original
meaning and the offer to form joint hunting groups, of advantage to all
participants, now carries the risk of a different, less advantageous, outcome.
There was thus a need to interpret meaning in communication, with the most
successful manipulators, and the best readers of false signals, having the
highest chance of survival.
If there was also selection of the optimal neural pathways needed
to aid interpretation, these would be fixed in the population and the process
of analysing hunting signals, and signals of many other kinds, would become more
and more refined. This new consciousness would extend to humans asking
questions about the environment around them, forming a complex language structure
to explain meaning, and, with further development of the brain, a need to ask abstract
questions like: "Why are we here?”; “Is there a supernatural force?”; and
“What is good and evil?”.
Or perhaps it was not like that at all?
[1] Felix Warneken and Alexandra G. Rosati (2015) Cognitive
capacities for cooking in chimpanzees. Proceedings
of The Royal Society B 282: 20150229. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.0229
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