Humans: The Cooking Ape, a lecture by Richard Wrangham

Speaker Series Lecture by Dr. Richard Wrangham, Harvard University & Leakey Foundation Grantee
September 22, 2007 at the Field Museum in Chicago
Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham lectures on Humans: The Cooking Ape, discussing his contention that the desire to cook is a defining characteristic of humanity.
Dr. Robert Martin of the Field Museum gives the introduction.

[@stevetobias6508]

Here is what I think might just add a really interesting dimension to the question of cooking and human evolution. In 2004, Hansel Stedman MD at U of Penn discovered a mutated gene in all humans (called MYH16) that really weakens that big jaw muscle that goes from the top of the cranium to the mandible. This is thought to allow the cranium to balloon into the comparative eggshell skull we all have. Now cooking would be a cultural adaptation that would significantly mitigate the cost of this mutation in terms of processing the diet, especially the meat increase that really helps support the energy cost of the growing brain. Look at "MYH16" in Wikipedia. I first learned of this mutation and the related ideas in a PBS Nova--either "what Darwin Never Knew" or "Becoming Human" I'll try to find this source, which features Stedman explaining his discovery.

[@tapatapaz]

My left ear enjoyed this. Very nice talk.

[@rogermuppet]

My left ear also enjoyed this.

[@anuragjoshi47]

Thoroughly

[@indoor_gangster]

does that mean my headphones are the wrong way around?

[@hojoinhisarcher]

I'd really like to know how this lecture ends!

[@chriscapablanca3491]

Suddenly

[@Howard2006]

Very good lecture with insights I had never considered. What about processed meats such as bologna and salami?

[@stevetobias6508]

BTW, I found Dr. Wrangham's insights really edifying, especially looking at the relative inefficiency of digesting this or that cooked or raw, and also the energy cost of the digestion itself. Wonder if Dr. Wrangham is aware of Steadman's work about how paleolithic cooking might have meshed with the cranium-releasing mutation in my previous post about MYH16.

[@alexiavandercruyssen1354]

Evoqvé ds les vidéos précédentes dv site

[@stuartcalow737]

We evolved in a volcanic rift valley. Seasonal wildfires must have exposed us to scavenged roast meat very early. Eurica! Prometheus gets it!

[@ongges20]

Eureka?

[@MichaelJohnson-fe8tm]

23:28 when you talk about calories in the food cooked vs raw you have to consider that the measuring process is essentially complete combustion so of course there is not going to be significant differences. The difference to a human is how many calories are available to that human after "human," not thermal digestion. Hands down, more human available energy after cooking.

[@danieldoyle2160]

please increase the volume.

[@barbaraguillette9632]

I was thinking about how we learned to eat cooked food. Lighting fire on the plains of Africa , animals caught, cooked, as scavengers when we returned ,we ate the cooked animals, , liked cooked food, more energy and less time hunting for food. feeling of fullness.

[@Aluminata]

Really quite ridiculous when you think of how far we have come with the tremendous quantum leaps of technological and asthetic innovations of chair production.

[@dombarton2483]

The Cooked food increases the glucose spike in a human. This increases insulin levels. The higher your insulin levels the greater your storage of fat. Insulin plays a significant part in fat storage. The truth is that calories have nothing at all to with deriving energy from food. Calories are heat, which cannot be eaten, cannot be burnt and are mass less. It's all about mass. Mass in mass out. Mass in the form of carbs, protein, and fats. When one loses body fat where does it go? Its oxidized to co2 and water. MASS out. We also release ketones, sweat, urine, poop, tears. Etc. Its mass not calories. If one takes a 1 liter of weighed water on a set of scales then boils it. After which its left to cool down at room temp..say 20 degrees celcius. You will find that the weight remains the same. However its lost 80kcal. This proves that calories have nothing to with weight. Hormones like leptin, grehlin and cortisol, insulin play a big role in body composition. Calories have never ever been the problem. Its mass.

[@macclift9956]

Small, blunt teeth are adapted well to eating *cooked* meat and fat? The cooking "predigests" difficult to digest foods such as meat.

[@jasonturner6459]

Meat is not especially hard to digest. Vegetable matter is harder.

[@mudslinger888]

Plants are so much harder to digest than meat and far less bioavailable.

[@macclift9956]

@@mudslinger888 Perhaps those who are not keen on the taste of meat should eat what pleases them and what they feel healthy on, however, those who turn vegetarian/vegan for ethical reasons alone but who then, much to their disgust, crave meat and fat *constantly* (not dissimilar to the cravings pregnant women experience), should take note that those cravings could be nature's way of tapping them on the shoulder to let them know that they're on the slippery slope of deteriorating health. Many meat-eaters share the sentiments of vegans/vegetarians and many have tried that way of eating, but because so many feel terrible on a no-meat diet, they wisely go back to eating in a more balanced way (for them, not for everyone). To each his own?

[@casiandsouza7031]

Yolk and albumin should be evaluated separately.

[@peouspaul1258]

Cooking vegetables most important.. it help consume lot of fibers and that lead to diversity of microbiome .. it is microbiome made human a intelligent animal.. meat is good protein but eat mammal meat very dangerous for human .. it lead to iron overload , inflammation..

[@GaiasFleas]

There's kind of a contradiction here. On the one hand, he says the main purpose of cooking is to soften the food and that the softer the food, the easier the digestion and hence the more calories harvested. Yet a raw foods diet is comprised mainly of soft, ripe fruits and vegetables and most of the time the staple is bananas (very soft). And he implies raw foodists don't get enough calories, even though their food is quite soft. So the softness of the food may actually be the deciding factor of how many calories are absorbed from what we eat, not whether the food is actually cooked or not.

[@ImmortalCreature]

cooking has not only the benefit to soften the food (e.g. tough meat would take energy to chew with human blunt teeth), cooking also destroys parasites and toxins and even can make some nutrients more bio-available. On the other hand, it destroys some vitamins and today our food is already super energy-dense. Therefore I think it makes a lot of sense to eat a lot of raw food, to balance modern super energy-dense foods and not get overweight.

[@GaiasFleas]

***** I'm starting to think it's actually the microbes (and possibly parasites) in the raw food that cause weight loss. Nothing to do with food consistency. This stuff wasnt controlled for in any of Wrangham"s studies.

[@GaiasFleas]

***** My point was that he says in this lecture that the cooking changes food consistency, making it softer and therefore easier to digest. But in the same lecture he says raw foodists (eating really soft food) are losing weight. It is proven that helminths, nematodes and beneficial bacterial, all of which cooking kills, can increase glucose tolerance, lower insulin and lower inflammation, all of which contribute to weight gain. I think this is a point he missed in his conclusions.

[@GaiasFleas]

***** All the studies you need right here. Look at the section on Diabetes and then Metabolic Syndrome: wormswell.com/science-research/

[@jaydogg505]

Cooking denature's protein meaning it unravels the dense knots of amino acids and that enables you to uptake more protein during the digestion process. It's like microscopic chewing.

[@imgleader1]

If one could die during the tediously long introduction the transition from life to death would be imperceptible.

[@YoutubeChannel-ol7zx]

Indeed

[@stuart940]

in order to eat meat what ! ? 1:00:55

[@klausgartenstiel4586]

of course its difficult to resist the smell of a pizza. because its a hyperstimulus. and that, via strange inversion of reasoning, is because our brain evolved to prefer high energy foods. and also because pizza is god's greatest gift to humanity.

[@RonJohn63]

Starts at 4:00.

[@daless8875]

So, fire, cooking, meat, and tubers undoubtedly had a big impact on early human's survival and therefore evolution since leaving the African jungle. This, however, says nothing of the groundwork laid out by their ancestors before them, who spent a much longer time evolving in the jungle, side by side with all the raw fruit that must have been so simple, appealing, and nutritious to eat.

[@antr6092]

Daless fruit didn't become truly appealing until humans began the domestication process. everything that you can buy at the store has been subject to centuries of selective breeding. look into the natural diet of the chimp and Gorilla and you will see the superiority of cooking food.

[@chrisbranciere2747]

"Daless fruit didn't become truly appealing until humans began the domestication process" Do you have any support for this wild claim? The tastiest and healthiest foods I have had were wild berries. "everything that you can buy at the store has been subject to centuries of selective breeding" The most popular and fundamentally unhealthy form of food processing is cooking. Even the smoke from cooking dead animals is ttoxic with polyaromatic hydrocarbons. "look into the natural diet of the chimp and Gorilla and you will see the superiority of cooking food" Go play fetch? Cooking kills most nutrients and denatures proteins. Chimp diets have far more phytochemicals and vitamins than the average human diet.

[@chrisbranciere2747]

"So, fire, cooking, meat, and tubers undoubtedly had a big impact on early human's survival and therefore evolution since leaving the African jungle." Leaving the African evolutionary niche indeed had an impact on evolution. Human ancestors stopped co-evolving in their natural habitat and adopted tools precisely because they could not biologically adapt to consume new food classes such as meat. Just because relatively recent ancestors survived on meat along with the food they co-evolved eating for tens of millions of years prior to the processed meat intake, does not necessarily mean humans evolved to eat meat. Humans processed the meat with fire precisely because they did not biologically adapt to it.

[@aniccadance13]

Chris Branciere Oh god, vegans don't ever stop preaching...

[@macnutz4206]

Cooking started in Africa. Africa is a large continent with many different different climate zones, much of which is not jungle. That has been true since before modern humans evolved. Cooking started in Africa, before human groups began to explore outside of Africa. Even in tropical zones, fruits and leaves have seasons. The fruit sources are not always producing. There are some other great lectures on Ytube that deal with the topic, Check out John Hawks. Also, a channel called Wednesday nite @ the lab. A lot of lectures on ancient forms of homo and paleoarchaeology. Evidence of the use of fire was found recently in South Africa, in a cave where a new species of ancient homos has been found, homoneledi. Charcoal formed a layer of the floor in one part of the caves the homoneledi fossils were found in. The fossils were dated to between about two hundred and fifty thousand to three hundred thirty five thousand years ago. More evidence of fire use has been found since this lecture was given.

[@WOTHAN66666]

Our teeth are made for fish, and fish one kinda must cook. And why we start eating cooked meat, is just it taste BETTER.

[@RonJohn63]

_Our teeth are made for fish_ Says who, based on what evidence?

[@WalkingEmDry]

Worst audio ever unwatchable

[@TheLeakeyFoundation]

Sorry about the audio quality on this. We have other Richard Wrangham lectures on our channel with better audio.