The World's Oldest Profession: Chef

In the February 25 Issue:

The world's oldest profession: chef

Cooking dates to almost 2 million years ago

By Rachel Ehrenberg

Web edition : Monday, August 22nd, 2011

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CHEW, CHEW, SLEEP, CHEWThis chimp and other non-human primates spend nearly half their time eating, but new research demonstrates that the cooking skills of Homo erectus allowed the lineage to save time and extract more nutrients, paving the way for bigger brains.Ronan Donovan

Nearly 2 million years ago, it seems the original naked chef was cooking up a storm. Homo erectus, the extinct hominid that’s a mere branch or so away from humans on the family tree, was the first to master cooking, new evidence suggests. This seminal event had huge implications for hominid evolution, giving the ancestors of modern humans time and energy for activities such as running, thinking deep thoughts and inventing things like the wheel and beer-can chicken.

“In the big picture, eating cooked food has huge ramifications,” says Harvard’s Chris Organ, a coauthor of the new study. Cooking and other food-processing techniques aren’t just time-savers; they provide a bigger nutritional punch than a raw diet. The new work is further evidence that cooking literally provided food for thought, making it easier for the body to extract calories from the diet that could then be used to grow a nice, big brain.

Humans are the only animals who cook, and compared to our living primate relatives we spend very little time gathering and eating food. We also have smaller jaws and teeth.

Homo erectus also had small teeth relative to others in the human lineage, and the going idea was that hominids must have figured out how to soften up their food by the time that H. erectus evolved. But behavioral traits such as the ability to whip up a puree or barbecue ribs don’t fossilize, so a real rigorous test of the H. erectus-as-chef hypothesis was lacking.

Organ and his colleagues, including Harvard’s Richard Wrangham, an early champion of the cooking hypothesis, decided to quantify the time one would expect humans to spend eating by looking at body size and feeding time in our living primate relatives. After building a family tree of primates, the researchers found that people spend a tenth as much time eating relative to their body size compared with their evolutionary cousins — a mere 4.7 percent of daily activity rather than the expected 48 percent if humans fed like other primates.

Then the team looked at tooth size within the genus Homo. From H. erectus on down to H. sapiens, teeth are much smaller than would be predicted based on what is seen in other primates, the team reports online the week of August 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Tooth size becomes dramatically smaller than what we would expect,” says paleoanthropologist David Strait of the University at Albany in New York, who was not involved with the work. “This is really compelling indirect evidence the human lineage became adapted to and dependent on cooking their food by the time Homo erectus evolved.”

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Comments 6

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Please use 1/2 when needing to write one half. Thank you . Mr. Johnson

Wayne Johnson

Aug. 23, 2011 at 10:35am
When citing the research of others it is customary to give credit. Richard Wrangham proposed and researched this theory in "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human." Not doing so is generally considered plagiarism.

Otto Schweigenthaler

Otto Schweigenthaler

Aug. 23, 2011 at 3:16pm
While I don't disagree with anything in the article, it has often been suggested that reduced tooth size could have been the result of tool use. Apes and early hominids presumably used their teeth for fighting, hunting, sharpening wooden spear tips, and probably many other activities. With increased use of hand held weapons and tools there would have been less evolutionary selection for growing large teeth.

Marty

Aug. 23, 2011 at 3:16pm
I have no disagreement with the findings in the article either, but I think (and have thought for years) that the most important contribution cooking supplied was the destruction of parasites in the food. The fewer parasites would naturally lead to a longer life span and more and healthier offspring.

Anna Watson

Anna Watson

Aug. 24, 2011 at 12:36pm
Marty -
Wrangham. who according to him advanced the theory against considerable resistance some time ago, has generally been been accepted on the authority of the very complicated evolutionary path from tree primate to human. (google him with book names..URL's not permitted here, but there's plenty of info on the Web) which can be a bit too detail oriented (Wrangham in person is captivating, and there are some videos streamed on the web.) He intertwines physiological givens with social developments in a highly logical exposition and explanation. The bottom line is that the low calorie availability from non processed sources had a time (80% spent chewing and digesting) and physiological cost (internal organs dedicated to digesting necessitating different limb structure, chewing taking up cranial space now available for brain) and that the processing of food set in motion a socializing process which included sexual labor division and eventually family and tribal structures, which impacts us (not just positively) today. It's a good read, although some parts are more easily skimmed. (How much do you really want to know about the primitive digestive system?)

Otto Schweigenthaler

Aug. 24, 2011 at 12:36pm
The difficulty I have with this analysis is it automatically assumes small teeth arose as a result of evolutionary necessity, that new dietary possibilities caused the emergence of smaller teeth, whereas small teeth my actually have arisen as a pure genetic quirk, forcing erectus to scramble for a dietary solution, much as Tasmanian Devils have seemingly adapted to dying much younger by becoming impregnable much younger.

Put it this way, if all of us handed people were to suddenly mysteriously die off leaving behind only people with no hands but an ability to use their mouths as hands - a situation under which some people do actually exist - then future 'oral' archaeologists digging up fossils with hands would automatically assume the reason these people became extinct was because they developed this strange impediment at their shoulders, arms with hands at the end of them, growths which obviously somehow impeded their ability to use their mouths properly, making them incapable of feeding or caring for themselves or seeking out food.

alan borky

Aug. 29, 2011 at 9:26am

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