Why do we cook are food?

Nice speculation ITT, but the real reason human beings started cooking food is because of three things: abundance, ability and curiosity.

Japanese macaques have been observed doing rudimentary food preparation. See, because the macaques now have an abundance of food and no longer need worry about starving to death, they can experiment with their food without concern that what they do will lead to their starvation. One macaque started by washing her potatoes in a freshwater spring. This removed the soil and improved the potato's flavour. Soon, all the other macaques in her group followed suit. One day, she made the fortuitous mistake of washing her sweet potato in a saltwater spring (or the ocean, I forgot which) and was like "Holy shit! Salt makes things taste good!" So she began using /only/ saltwater sources for her potatoes. Again, all the other macaques followed her example.

Basically, give an animal with the ability to experiment with new things an abundance of things with which to experiment while meeting all four of its basic needs and it will begin to experiment. Thereafter, it's only a matter of time until seasoning is discovered. Then fermentation. Then cooking.

look at that very speculative post.

>At this rate Macaques will launch a shuttle into space before an African nigger does
It really tickles your neurons.

>seasoning before fermentation

kek

Chewing takes a lot of energy, basically.
Have a look at how much of a primate's day is spent chewing, and think about how cooking cuts down on that.

Cooking food breaks down the cell walls and allows more nutrients to be released.

>Have a look at how much of a primate's day is spent chewing, and think about how cooking cuts down on that.
>Pseudoscience - The Post
The reason primates, and every other herbivore spends the majority of the day grazing is because of the caloric content of a plant based diet.

wouldn't be if they cooked it

Absolutely seasoning occurs before fermentation. Well, seasoning on purpose occurs before fermenting on purpose, anyway.
As seen with the macaques, who purposefully season their potatoes in saltwater and have yet to be observed purposefully fermenting their food for consumption.

The Africans don't have their four basic needs met yet, so are unable to participate regularly in innovation. The don't have shelter, food, water and security. The macaques do.

you are talking out of your ass. fermented foods are everywhere in the wild.

Cooking food improves digestion and nutrional intake. It isn't an understatement to say that cooking is what gave us the nutrition to evolve into the apex species on the planet. We owe our intelligence and large brain to cooking almost entirely. See also

>The Africans don't have their four basic needs met yet, so are unable to participate regularly in innovation. The don't have shelter, food, water and security. The macaques do.
>Monkey's are literally 10000% better at being upstanding human citizens than Africans.

You dont cook a salad

why dont africans have their basic needs though? it can't just be because of the climate, right?

>he doesn't understand the difference between an animal fermenting X on purpose v finding X that simply fermented by happenstance

We owe it to meat eating and we owe meat eating to females.

rice salad you obstinate cunt

>We owe it to meat eating and we owe meat eating to females.
>we owe meat eating to females

Is this a pun about eating pussy or women working in the kitchen or... what?

Cause i'm pretty sure the whole "kill a wild animal, then cook it" operation was more of a partnership shared by everyone who didn't want to fucking die.

Females are likely the first to create tools, including weaponry. With most intelligent species, tools are first implemented by the females of the group, often to level competition with males which tend to be stronger and larger. Female dolphins use tools to help catch fish. They teach this to their offspring, though their sons tend to not care much and most won't follow what they're taught. Female elephants have been observed using tools to swat flies they can't reach with their trunks.

Similarly, female primates are observed hunting with simple spears and fishing with rudimentary harpoons far more than are males. Bonobos, which have a culture more centred on communal sharing than most other primates, have their females using tools for grooming and shelter than for hunting and warding off unwanted advances by males. Bonobo females even make and use dildos.

Female chimpanzees use spears to kill and eat bushbabies and female orangutans use harpoons to fish (or, more accurately, to steal fish caught in fishermen's nets)

It's highly likely that human females were the first of our species to use tools and weaponry, too, just as females in most other species are the first to use tools in theirs.

100g of raw rice is more nutritious and calorific than 100g of cooked rice.

> tools are first implemented by the females of the group, often to level competition with males which tend to be stronger and larger

this is nonsense.

men create the tools to better compete with other males, as well as to provide for their families better.

furthermore, look at the evolution of tools in all of recorded human history, almost all are made by men.

you have one single example of an animal 'seasoning' a food and you're extrapolating a linear progression of evolved culinary behaviours in the wild. it's stupid. there are many examples of animals preferentially selecting fermented foods, washing them, acidulating them, even heating them... you aren't gonna win a nobel prize cause you heard some podcast on macaques or some shit once

>Bonobo females even make and use dildos.

Male bonobos have made pocket vaginas out of any number of small animals.

>are food
Of course cooking food is a novel concept to a savage nigger who can barely write.

>we owe meat eating to females

preposterous, since its males that did the hunting inorder to provide that meat (as well as themselves partaking of the meat after the hunt before bringing it back to the family, so as to replace nutrients lost in the hunt.

hunting is an all day affair.

what the fuck is that supposed to mean

>100g of raw rice is more nutritious and calorific than 100g of cooked rice.

this is clever bait tho

prove it. eat 100g of raw rice and post the video. cretin.

in much of the history of european cuisine, all vegetables where cooked.

this is because the fertilizer/manure used was sometimes also human in origin.

Animals can be susceptible to food-borne illnesses as well, particularly parasitic illnesses. It's not so much that humans have evolved a weakness, that other animals, particularly carnivores and even more so carrion-eaters, have evolved to tolerate consumption of pathogens in food.

Because of agriculture and factory farming. You can easily have a full raw food diet if you live in a western country, though it might cost you a bit.

Grains and most legumes need to be cooked to be edible, the vegetables that can be eaten raw are harder to mass produce and to keep fresh over long periods of time without destroying nutrients and flavor.

Most meats can theoretically be eaten raw too if it comes from a healthy animal, which is something you won't find in a factory farm. If you go hunting in the wild and kill an animal with barely or no contact to humans then it will probably be less dangerous to eat raw. Though you might still catch worms other parasites, so I wouldn't suggest it.

cooking is essentially an invention created by early man and paired with agriculture so that we could enjoy the convenience of eating stock-piled food instead of grazing like animals.

essentially cooking food turned humans into carrion feeders.

carrion feeding isn't hunting user.

no

my expectation is that drying of meats came before cooking of them, especiallybin climates suitable for that.

smoking probably came very close behind cooking.

boiling was probably later, due to the difficulty of creating cooking vessels that can withstand the heat required to boil water and the food in it.

as to cooking over an open fire, i expect early man found a warm meal more satisfying than a cold raw one, as well as the maillard effect making grilled meat particularly tasty

>as to cooking over an open fire, i expect early man found a warm meal more satisfying than a cold raw one

much more likely to have been because it's much easier to eat.

adding to this, there is one thing i find perplexing and have never looked into.

our ancestors certainly did not boil their water before consumption so as to kill pathogens/parasites, but any modern man is more or less forced to.

i hope this is simply the result of lack of exposure and subsequent lack in immune efficienc of an individualy, rather than a congenital trait.

i find it shameful that i cant drink from a stream as my ancestors did in the wilderness, without having ro worry i will shit my guts out afterwards.

i'll do it for you and you can get my poop transplanted into you if you pay me a couple thousand bucks

warm food feels good

and the flavor of cooked meat is improved, atlesst to a human palate.

there are two different accounts of what condition the teeth of our ancestors had. one says they experienced more wear, and mechanically degraded faster, while the other puts of much of modern tooth decay to rest mostly on sugar in our diets.

there is also a social aspect to cooking meat over an open fire that i think is significant even in the time of our distant ancestors. much more so than sitting in a circle around an uncooked carcass.

i dont put much weight on the "ease of eating" thing. when you are hungry, thats the last thing on your mind.

if your teeth are good, its not much harder to eat raw meat than it is cooked meat. you just chew in a different way, or simply swallow it in chunks.

and dried meat is even harder to chew than fresh uncooked meat, and dried meat mostly certainly was a staple very early on.

Don't worry user. Your ancestor had to worry about that to. That's why he learned to boil water in the first place, so he didn't shit his brains out and die of dehydration.

im a registered nurse and have colleagues working in poop transplantation. fascinating field, since it really does seem to work.

dunno about it increasing capability to withstand water born pathogens though.

still, i find it a mark of shame that i cant drink from a stream my ancestors would have. makes me feel like i have degenerated.

Nor do you make friends with it.

>i dont put much weight on the "ease of eating" thing. when you are hungry, thats the last thing on your mind.

it makes an enormous difference when you're talking about a big working muscle on a wild animal. it's like ten times harder if you don't break it down with cooking.

difficult to boil water though, cos you need a vessel in which to do it. even harder to provide for a larger community say of 6-12 people.

i suppose they could have used wooden vessels or rock cauldrons, but in my limited knowledge, i dont think these have much archaelogical evidence.

I just ate a raw Apple tho

ill take your word for it, ive never tried.

nonetheless, when it comes to the meat from a large animal, it would have been too much to eat, even cooked, before it spoiled.

drying would naturally be the way to preserve the excess.

We make piles of cows so high that by the point the first cows shit gets to the bottom we have already elected a new president

Some finds have indicated use of dropping heated stones into clay pots or tightly woven baskets.

mostly for soupish kinds of things, not just boiling water, either way he really didn't need to boil it, just raise the temp above 140 as thats when most bacteria is killed off.

How about the fact that cooked food doesn't immediately rot without a fridge?

yeah ive seen that done with heated stones.

must have been remarkable and almost magical to early humans to see what happens to the water when you put a hot stone into it.

wpuld still require quite a large cooking vessel though, and if there is food in it, gets even harder to keep the temperature up.

dunno about clay vessels in the stone age.
woven baskets perhaps. ive seen some baskets made of birch bark with hot stones i them (think it was a Ray Mears episode)

quite a romantic thought to think that perhaps our ancestors constructed large baskets, like a meter in diameter, for boiling water or boiling meals with heated stones at the bottom.

Well they don't really need shelter that much in Africa and i have seen them hunt, they pretty much while out everything that moves and strip the flesh and cook it for consumption so that's two
They bring water from the river, not sure why they haven't figured out its easier to live next to the river tho and as security their only risk are other Africans.
Maybe they had so much available food they just reproduced so fast it reached a point food became scarce and this happened way before they could develop science

yes, but not by much.

does make it harder for fly maggots to find purchase in it though i think, especially in grilled meat.

i stand by the expectation that most of the leftover meat was probably dried thoughm rather than còoked.

in some climates the meat could simply be frozen in winter ofc.

i think there is some archaeological evidence of rudimentary underground food storages that had lower tempersture as well as protecting the food from insects etc.

just off the top of my head, considering the african environment, sources of water are often also where predators and large animals dangerous to humans live.

this is less of an issue in europe, and i think europe overall has more riverways and lakes than africa ever has, per square kilometer.

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense at all.
The first tools and i mean crafted tools beyond picking up a stick or a rock where likely to be hammers not something sharp, stabbing is just stabbing and anyone can stab but a hammer is based on strength. Some chimpanzee that live tnear mostly only fruit based food have actively developed hammers to gbreakshit open and that's considered to be the most advanced we have seen yet

Where are the examples of animals collecting and fermenting food then repeating the behaviour, thereby proving they understand that doing X will yield Y result?

>podcast
I don't even really know what one is exactly and I certainly have never listened to or watched one.

First and foremost, men create the tools /today/. Prehistoric females, however, were the first. Secondly, this "men hunt, women don't" thing shows you know nothing of anthropology.
Observing hunter-gatherer societies that still exist today, especially the various uncontacted peoples of the world, imply that the idea of labour being split according to gender is near-to nonexistent. Men are seen gathering food and women are seen hunting. This implies that paleolithic societies did the same and has been very, very well documented by Steven Kuhn, among others.
As we have no early humans to observe to see the genesis of tool-making, we can only observe its occurrence among non-human primates. These observations show that it is unilaterally female primates which first use and implement tools. Some males, usually offspring of a tool-using mother, occasionally follow thereafter, but daughters of tool-using mothers will always use tools.
We see weaponised tools being used by female primates on hunts, to fend off unwanted males and to help in gathering. It is also observed that males that learn to use tools do so less successfully than females. It's been proposed that it's likely because male primates are preoccupied, no joke, with masturbating, playing and doing fuck knows what else while the females learn from their tool-using mothers how to best utilise tools.

primitive methods of drying would also break down the connective tissues.

Well animals don't often approach big tribes of noisy humans

Well if you are talking about animals who eat tons of fruit and don't really have any particular interest in spice it's likely they will discover fermentation before.
There are monkeys in Brazil that steal tourists drinks and actively go for alcoholic fruity ones over cola

yes, and there is also the issue of protecting your tribe against the males from other tribes.

a weapon, no matter how crude, is a huge advantage over bare hands.

as to the evolution of tools, i suppose simply using a rock for crushing came before the evokution of the simple but effective spear.

spear probably came somewhere after uumans discovered they can throw rocks and kill things, realising that a pointed stick is more effective both thrown and as a stabbing tool against larger prey or human opponents.

in anycase, it would have been men that developed them, primarily as weapons for defence and killing things.

using stones to crush grains may have been somewhat concurrent.

cutting instruments, dunno. certainly necessary for dismembering a carcass.

Chimpanzee is likely to develop spears because they can naturally sharpen wood with their strong teeth and jaw. Female chimpanzee could easily develop spears before male chimpanzee.
Humans don't have the hability to sharpen using teeth, it's unlikely that sharp was our first concept of crafting

Anthropologist Gerald (?) Diamond proposes that the development of agriculture, likely created by females as a means to make gathering simpler, is the point at which female primates stop developing tools and start to lose standing in society.
From that point, they stay put and tend fields. With this relative ease of living, they start having multiple pregnancies, often one after another, and become busy with caring for offspring.

The first tools were spears, sharpened either by teeth or by grinding down on a rough surface. This is seen today with prisoners making shivs of toothbrushes. They aren't making hammers. Spears are the simplest weapon and therefore the first ones used.

>discover fermentation
That's not enough. They need to understand it and reproduce it. The macaques mentioned earlier understand seasoning. They get that a potato tastes better with salt on it than without. They dip potatoes in salted water to reproduce that experience. We do not have examples of any animals actively gathering items for fermentation in order to consume it.

see They also grind spears even sharper by grinding them on rough surfaces, like certain sorts of stones. We can say that the stone is the first tool and thrown stones the first weapon, but the spear is undoubtedly the first weapon made.

I see you have replied to my post, here is another post you may want to reply I wrote too

you are completely wrong.

almost all hunter-gatherer tribes existant today share this division of labor among the sexes.

the reaso being that males are physically more fit for hunting, as well as having a better conception of 3d space as is useful especially in thrown implements and bows. the males also gather during their hunts should opportunity present itself and especially if no game is forth coming.

furthermore, someone has to take care of the children who cannot be left alone. women, as the one who has carried the child to term and then breastfed it for much of its young life, are better suited to this role.

women may have developed tools such as a needle and rudimentary threads, or been the first to grind seeds or grain, possibly.

but the onus on hunting and defence of the tribe against other tribes, is on the males, and the development of tools as weapons naturally follows feom this and from them.

as to males learning to use tools slower, it is demonstrated than men have a slower process of development into their adult prime. women mature earlier, probably as a function of being able to breed earlier.

Also, these earlier mothers would have focused their socialisation and education on their daughters, so as to prepare them for their roles and related to which tasks the mother knows best.

its only later in age, probably around puberty, that males are invited to join the males on their hunting trips. before that, they would have practiced some rudimentary skills related to that future hunting role with their other male children counterparts.

>This is seen today with prisoners
Ok I'm being trolled

Who are you quoting?

yes

many animals partake of partially fermented fruits in the fall. birds love them, squirrels love them and even cows love fermented apples and pears.

>Have our stomachs and immune systems gotten weaker?

I'm sure our immune systems have gotten weaker, but that's not really relevant. The issue is other parts of our body. Mainly our jaws.

Near-human primates have much larger jaw muscles than we humans do. They need this to chew up plant fiber to make it digestible, and they also spend a massive amount of their time during the day doing so. Cooking food is a massive evolutionary advantage because it means that we don't have to sit on our butts for 10 hours a day chewing.

No, I do not concider pensioners making sharp toothbrushes as suficient proof that the first crafted tools where spear

You don't have to OP

chewing on a stick doesnt sharpen ypur teeth.

the enamel on uour teeth is many times over far harder than any stick.

you are confusing humans and primates with rodents, that have teeth which continue to grow in length throughout their lifetime.

im primates and apes, that does not happen.

I would like the fact that different animals with different bodys being more likely to develop different tools acknowledged please
Putting a stick between two sharp rocks seems like a much more advanced thought that put hard rock that I already use to smash in long stick I already use to reach the same way chew on stuck o stick sharp is likely easy for a chimpanzee

I meant sharpen the stick you master ruseman

>all this
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

>cutting instruments, dunno.

Cutting instruments were very early forms of technology because they are so easy to make.

Smack one rock against another rock so that it breaks. Now you have a razor sharp edge, though perhaps with a not-so-ideal shape. Do that a few more times and you can make a knife, scraper, etc.

You can also source cutting edges from natural sources: teeth, tusks, etc. Many are naturally sharp. Others (like a piece of bone) can be made sharp by rubbing it against a rock.

>> it's unlikely that sharp was our first concept of crafting
I agree. A crushing implement (hammer, club) was surely first. Simply picking up a rock or a tree branch would make a crude one.

....but humans don't need their jaw to sharpen a stick. They could simply rub it against a stone.

>The first tools were spears
this is false.

the first tool was a rock, which can be used for bashing, grinding and throwing with no modification.

Huh?

Then again you where never very sharp where you?
And who needed stones and who needed sticks? Men because men hunted because we know that our form of society is based on women staying at home and carrying pregnancy, maybe harvesting fruits while men risk their lives
I mean just fucking look at our bodys, men are designed to hurt

>first tool was a rock
See I think user said 'tool' but meant 'weapon.'

I assume we mean "tool that humans actually created", as opposed to picking up a stick or a rock.

But we are talking about the first concept of crafting taking something and making it something else with the purpose of making it useful we are talking about tools.
Stones and sticks where around, it's easy to pick one and figure what's good for, the idea of turning it to something else is more advanced, there was no other purpose for hitting the stick with the rock but to sharpen it couldn't have been done with any other purpose or by mistake
Stones where already being used for crushing, stone to hammer is an easy upgrade.
That's why boiling wasn't the first way of cooking you can't boil if you aren't trying to boil but you can drop meat on firr

>look at our bodies
>men are designed to hurt
That's been covered as an explanation of why females developed tools first. See and

>likely created by females as a means to make gathering simpler,

gathering requires no tools.

the earliest primitive tool for this, would have been a simple stick used for knocking fruit out of trees beyond reach, or digging for tubers/grubs.

nonetheless, there is no reason to conclude that men would not have developed this use first (as well as its usefulness in tribal defence/offence and bashing animals on the head out of reach) as well as in their own foraging before females did.

the first need for a tool, would have been for killing and defence, which would have been the most importsnt fundamenþal needs.

pri ate young are vulnerable, it wojld have been unsound for the female to venture far out with her children along. the men instead took on this task, freeing the women to care for the children (which is in the males interest as well, as it is his progeny).

>there was no other purpose for hitting the stick with the rock but to sharpen it couldn't have been done with any other purpose or by mistake

Are you drunk? I have no idea what you are trying to say here.

There is a reason why hunter gaderer society's today are hunter gaderer society's today you can't just assume they stopped evolving even if they remained tribal

>The macaques mentioned earlier understand seasoning. They get that a potato tastes better with salt on it than without. They dip potatoes in salted water to reproduce that experience.

you are making a metric fuckton of assumptions here.

>society's
>'s
>'

Why do you do this?

Literally everything in this post strengthens the argument in the post you've replied to.

>the first need for a tool, would have been for killing and defence, which would have been the most importsnt fundamenþal needs.
Except no. The first tools were used to crack gathered things open. And to defend. And females, being smaller than males and therefore at a disadvantage, created tools for defense out of necessity. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.

If I give you a stick and a stone and i tell you you can hit with stick hard and hit with stone hard and could either combine the two to hit harder or come up with a tool the world has never seen before which one are you most likely dto do?
Hitting hard as a concept already existed, sharp didn't,

My phone does it, I'm a human phone hibryd I don't fully control the text input because there is a little bit of code on me that corrects my text even tho it doesn't work at all

>you're making assumptions
Hardly.
We're making observations. The macaques, when given a potato, actively seek out a saltwater source. They originally ate the potato as is. Then, some female began washing off the dirt from her potatoes in freshwater.
Then, other macaques followed her example. Later, she began using a saltwater source instead of freshwater. Still after, the other macaques followed her example. Now, all the macaques in that group use a saltwater source to wash potatoes exclusively and do not use freshwater for that purpose at all.
Why else would they actively seek out saltwater for this use rather than use freshwater?

The first tool wasn't crafted it was either a stick or a stone that's not creation
And no a hammer is a tool that serves men because even tho anyone hits harder with a hammer men have the upper body strength to use it correctly, a tribal woman with a hammer still couldn't break open a coconut

>Cutting instruments were very early forms of technology because they are so easy to make

Not so easy. You need a particular kind of stone that can form an edge, another stone suitable to create that edge with, and time/patience/diligence and coordination to create the edge.

Thats a lot, plus the cognitive hurdle of even understanding what a cutting edge is and what you can do with it.

Teeth and claws are pointed, not cutting instruments. Sharpening a bone to create a cutting edge is very very difficult, and its a material unsuitable to that purpose.

Bone knifes exist, but primarily in regions where stones suitable for creating a cutting edge (primarily flint) are unavailable or they simply stuck with bone instead (such as among many inuit populations in the far north).

TLDR: A cutting edge is a huge step forward, far more difficult to produce, and requires a higher level of intelligence to even conceive of.

A rock as a bashing tool, and a spear as a poi ted tool, are far simpler on all 3 accounts.