>
> http://www.harvard-magazine.com/on-line/050465.html
<Cooking makes this possible by changing the brittleness of collagen fiber,
softening it and making meat far easier to chew. "People who think that meat
dominated the diet of early Homo may well be right," he says, "but they
would have to have spent five hours a day just chewing. Raw meat is very
hard to chew, and presumably raw wild meat is even harder>

cooking in water can makes tender a tough piece of meat but early hominids
could not boiled meat only roasting .
raw meats are way easier to chew than fully cooked meats in my experience .
the latest being drier .most of the meat of the animals i eat are so easy to
chew .( you don't even have to chew if you cut bite size as the digestion
occure in the acidic environement of the stomac

<Chimps spend about six hours a day chewing. Humans, who typically weigh
more than chimpanzees, should theoretically eat more and spend even more
time at it. Instead, data from 15 cross-cultural studies indicate that on
average, human beings spend about one hour a day chewing food.>

chimps are mostly vegetarian while hominids eat lot of meats so the
comparaison don't hold water because meats are way more dense and quicker to
chew than plants .
th fact that humans beings who cook spend only one hour chewing don't mean
that hominids eating raw were disavantaged to  have  to chew longer

<"The rate at which they chew and swallow meat is equivalent to the way they
eat fruits: 300 to 400 calories per hour.">

chimps don't use sharp stones to deal with a prey just their hands and
teeths , hominids wityh stones can eat raw  meat from a carcass in a much
quicker way .i can swallow one pound or more of raw meats cut out from bones
with a stone knife in no time .



("You can't feed babies beef jerky)

i have fed my kids , jerky before they had teeths and i can tell they suck
everything out of it leaving only tasteless fibers ) those monsters have
powerfull jaws and gums


> and here's a supporting/background article on Wrangham's research
> from an earlier issue:
>
> http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/1100110.html

>
<Until it's heated, our digestive systems can't use it." That means our
ancestors could obtain as much nutrition from one roasted tuber as they
could from several raw ones, and therefore needed to eat less. >

too bad that they didn't do the experience , it will become obvious to them
that anyone will eat less of the raw tuber than the cooked one . pigs also
experience a stop on raw tuber while gorge on cooked to the point of
becoming obese ( old farmers knew that to makes a pig fat you have to cook
the potatoes )
starch well chewed  in the heated environment of the body is use as much
than cooked .

i am so disapointed that those articles are based only on speculations that
doesn't even get verified .
jean-claude