Cooking food makes us human

Anthropologist Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human believes that the discovery of cooked food led to evolutionary changes resulting in a smaller and different digestive system based on a higher-quality diet, mainly relying on cooked meat. In an interview on NPR's Science Friday (text and audio), Professor Wrangham explores concepts such as the digestive costs of food, the benefits (or lack thereof) of raw diets, and a distinct preference in Great Apes for cooked food over raw.

Here's an interesting excerpt:

But here's the thing. Nowadays, we look at people, and we find that if people go onto a diet of raw food, then something peculiar happens -which is that unlike every other animal, they do not thrive in terms of getting really adequate energy. And there is a pretty clear reason for this, which is that our species has a very odd type of digestive system.

It's less than two-thirds of the size of the digestive system if we were a great ape - like a chimpanzee or a gorilla - in relationship to our body size. And so we have somehow, and for some reason, adapted to having a small gut - and we also have small teeth and small mouths - all of which indicates that we, as a species, have adapted to a diet which is very high quality, and we don't have to put large amounts through our gut and retain them and ferment them for many, many hours.

Hat tip: Slashdot