The article I have chosen to summarize is “Cooking Up Bigger Brains”, written by Rachel Moeller Gorman. In short, the article primarily speaks about the views that researcher Richard Wrangham has on the stimulation of human evolution, specifically the significance of cooking upon evolution. Mr.Wrangham states that the practice of cooking our food, beginning with our ancestors the Homo erectus, led to our evolution as a species and enabled us to cultivate more nutrients/energy from the food that we ate. This in turn led to our species having more energy to expend on their growth, allowing for stronger muscles, healthier immune systems, and primarily the biggest factor in our evolution as a species, a bigger and better brain. Throughout the
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When you look at the big picture of that statement, having food that is easier to digest means two things, 1. Less energy is used in the consumption and breaking down internally of said food, and 2. More energy is gained from said food because our stomach has an easier time extracting the useful nutrients from the food itself. Because of easier digestion, our ancestors wouldn’t need the large guts that they had previously, and thus might have led to the reduction of gut size as the energy that was required to process the food would go to the development of our bodies and brain. Wrangham also provides data and information that backs up his claims about cooked food in two primary manners. Firstly, he presents the idea of tooth size reduction. Around 1.6 to 1.9 million years ago, our ancestors Homo erectus diverged from their predecessors Homo habilis. H. erectus had 50% larger brains and experienced the largest drop in tooth size in the evolution of humans. Wrangham brings up this information to possibly show a correlation between the facts that not only were the H. erectus brain size increasing because they were consuming more calories/energy, but their teeth were decreasing in size as well because the food
When you look at the big picture of that statement, having food that is easier to digest means two things, 1. Less energy is used in the consumption and breaking down internally of said food, and 2. More energy is gained from said food because our stomach has an easier time extracting the useful nutrients from the food itself. Because of easier digestion, our ancestors wouldn’t need the large guts that they had previously, and thus might have led to the reduction of gut size as the energy that was required to process the food would go to the development of our bodies and brain. Wrangham also provides data and information that backs up his claims about cooked food in two primary manners. Firstly, he presents the idea of tooth size reduction. Around 1.6 to 1.9 million years ago, our ancestors Homo erectus diverged from their predecessors Homo habilis. H. erectus had 50% larger brains and experienced the largest drop in tooth size in the evolution of humans. Wrangham brings up this information to possibly show a correlation between the facts that not only were the H. erectus brain size increasing because they were consuming more calories/energy, but their teeth were decreasing in size as well because the food