On Dec 3, 2006, at 1:17 PM, Philip wrote:

>
> How is it that we've adapted to drinking raw milk after about  
> 6000-9000
> years, but not to cooking Paleo foods after 125,000 or more years?

What I'm supposing is that milk was never totally inappropriate, if  
not drunk as milk, then because of its biological commonalities wit  
the rest of the animal we ate
>
.....
> I've never heard of another species cooking food :-), though wild  
> animals
> and birds are known to gobble up cooked carcasses after a forest  
> fire and
> many (such as raccoons and bears) will eat cooked meats found in human
> refuse. That doesn't indicate adaption, of course, since being  
> edible does
> not make a food biologically appropriate.

Exactly my point about cooking. I think it's just a bad habit. And of  
course, I meant the species to which we feed cooked.

> Everu human culture for the last
> 125,000 years has cooked at least some of its meats. I don't know  
> how long
> human beings have been feeding cooked meats to domesticated animals  
> (I'll
> use dogs as the example, since they were the first animal  
> domesticated), how
> much of fed meats was still raw after feeding cooked meats began,  
> or how
> much dogs might be adapted to cooked meats. Earliest estimates for
> domestication of dogs is 60 to 135,000 ya (Robert K. Wayne). Neoteny
> (retention of juvenile traits) is often cited as evidence of at  
> least some
> adaptation to cooked foods. Neoteny is far more pronounced in  
> humans than in
> dogs (humans are nearly hairless and have smaller teeth than dogs  
> or other
> primates despite bigger heads relative to body, etc.), indicating  
> possibly
> more adaptation to cooked foods among humans.
>
> I certainly don't advocate feeding carnivorous pets only cooked  
> meats. I eat
> some rare meats and occasionally raw seafood myself, along with more
> thoroughly cooked stuff. I think the greatest benefit of raw meats is
> probably the organs that contain vitamin C, like the adrenal and  
> thymus
> glands. Unfortunately, these are not part of our culture.

Doesn't mean you can't eat them. I do, buying them "for the dogs".  
Mostly liver, spleen, kidneys, heart, brains - sweetbreads are still  
a luxury, and somewhat rare.
>
> Also, arguing that we have adapted to cooked meats doesn't mean  
> that it was
> necessarily a good thing that we adapted. It probably would have  
> been better
> in some ways if humans had remained raw meat eaters, since this  
> might have
> prevented or reduced the neonatinization of human beings. Less body  
> hair,
> smaller teeth and finer bones make us less well adapted to nature.  
> On the
> other hand, our brains might not have gotten as big as they did  
> (though look
> at the trouble our brains have gotten us into :-) ).

There is a theory that the big brains came about as a result of our  
starting to eat meat - the economy of nutrition enabling the further  
development of a species not tied to eating all day long for meagre  
results. This was way before cooking, too. I've heard that neoteny is  
a product of domestication - I wonder in which ways, and if eating  
cooked really is one of them. As you mentioned, many dogs have gone  
right ahead and thrived on raw scrap and hunting, and yet they are no  
more or less neotenized. The physiognomic features we breed into dogs  
resolve quickly, with a few generations, into the wild prototypical  
dog, whether or not fed raw, when breeding is unmanaged. It would be  
fun to see what happens to humans fed raw over generations, too:)

ginny

All stunts performed without a net!