Yes, I've mentioned Wrangham's theories several times before on this list and 
have pointed out why his claims are wrong. For one thing, Wrangham himself 
has openly admitted that he has no real evidence to back up his claims re 
cooking being invented 1.8 million years ago, and his tuber-theories are 
generally not considered remotely realistic by most  Palaeoarchaeologists:-

"But Henry Bunn, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, 
Madison, has a more typical--and skeptical--reaction to the tuber theory. He 
says Wrangham's team "downplay[s] lots of sound evidence that we have [for 
meat-eating and fire use] and [accepts] at face value problematic evidence." 
A major problem for the theory, notes Hill, is that where there's cooking 
smoke, there must be fire. Yet he, Michigan's Brace, and most other 
anthropologists contend that cooking fires began in earnest barely 250,000 
years ago, when ancient hearths, earth ovens, burnt animal bones, and flint 
appear across Europe and the middle East. Back 2 million years ago, the only 
sign of fire is burnt earth with human remains, which most anthropologists 
consider coincidence rather than evidence of intentional fire. 

O'Connell counters that fires for cooking tubers rather than meat "might have 
been very ephemeral" and left few traces, but most of his colleagues remain 
unconvinced. "I think there would be evidence if it were [behind] as important 
an evolutionary leap as [Wrangham's team] suggests," says Behrensmeyer. "

"Even Wrangham agrees that more evidence is needed. "There hasn't been 
enough satisfactory archaeology for people to get their teeth into," he says. 
But he also contends that the more he looks into the question, the more 
convinced he is of cooking's great importance, even 1.8 million years ago. "


Secondly, even www.beyondveg.com(which I hasten to add is a website 
openly and heavily biased in favour of the issue of cooking) has pointed out 
serious defects in Wrangham's claim that cooked-tubers led to greater human 
brain-size:-

"Recent tuber-based hypothesis for evolutionary brain expansion fails to 
address key issues such as DHA and the recent fossil record. As a case in 
point, there has been one tentative alternative hypothesis put forward 
recently by primatologist Richard Wrangham et al. [1999] suggesting that 
perhaps cooked tubers (primarily a starch-based food) provided additional 
calories/energy that might have supported brain expansion during human 
evolution.

However, this idea suffers from some serious, apparently fatal flaws, in that 
the paper failed to mention or address critical pieces of key evidence regarding 
brain expansion that contradict the thesis. For instance, it overlooks the 
crucial DHA and/or DHA-substrate adequacy issue just discussed above, which 
is central to brain development and perhaps the most gaping of the holes. It's 
further contradicted by the evidence of 8% decrease in human brain size 
during the last 10,000 years, despite massive increases in starch consumption 
since the Neolithic revolution which began at about that time. (Whether the 
starch is from grain or tubers does not essentially matter in this context.) 
Meat and therefore presumed DHA consumption levels, both positive *and* 
negative-trending over human evolution, track relatively well not simply with 
the observed brain size increases during human evolution, but with the 
Neolithic-era decrease as well, on the other hand. [Eaton 1998]

These holes, among others in the hypothesis, will undoubtedly be drawing 
comment from paleo researchers in future papers, and hopefully there will be a 
writeup on Beyond Veg as more is published in the peer-review journals in 
response to the idea. At this point, however, it does not appear to be a 
serious contender in plausibly accounting for all the known evidence."

In short, there is no evidence whatsoever that cooking was instrumental re 
human brain-development(though undoubtedly, in terms of cultural 
development, later on), and the prevailing evidence clearly indicates that 
cooking was invented only c.250,000 years ago.

Geoff


On Sat, 10 May 2008 23:48:56 -0700, Ken Stuart <k-
[log in to unmask]> wrote:


>
>If you search the archives of this list for "Wrangham", you will find some
>papers and discussions about how tubers were an important part of the diet 
of
>Paleolithic humans, and how cooking is far older than originally thought, in
>fact as old as "humans", and how cooking was important in the development 
and
>advancement of human beings.
>
>--
>Cheers,
>
>Ken