I'm afraid you seem to be of the erroneous opinion that "might makes right" - ie "if the majority of people do something, then it must be for some logical reason". This is, of course , completely illogical, and based on a false premise. After all, millions of Bangladeshis have drawn water from arsenic-contaminated wells, for decades, that doesn't mean that drinking arsenic-contaminated water is healthy for them!

 

Re palaeolithic/cooked:- The vast majority of palaeoanthropologists openly snigger at Wrangham for his absurd theories, judging from the various online articles, and they  point to the c.250,000 year-old figure for the advent of cooking. Now, the Palaeolithic era more or less began c. 2.5 million years ago, so the time spent eating cooked food was, therefore, only a mere 10% of the Palaeolithic era(the tail-end of the Palaeolithic at that), if we are to take the majority opinion. So, cooking is hardly "Palaeo" by any means and is relatively recent in terms of era/epoch.

 

Re starting a fire:- I have actually had some experience re starting a fire(decades before going rawpalaeo), and can state, quite confidently, that starting a fire is a major undertaking even in the driest of climates(I invariably required modern technology to start any fire such as using tinderboxes or solid fuel/matches etc.) Starting a fire from scratch, using just flints and pieces of wood is a major undertaking and the invention of fire, itself, requires a hefty amount of brain-power, in the first place. Yet. Wrangham loves to exaggerate and makes absurd claims that cooking led to larger humqan brains when it is pretty clear that cooking(and fire) requires larger human brains to initiate the forme techniques.

 

(Another, obvious, point, is that technological progress during the Palaeolithic era was virtually static until  very late,c.60,000 years ago, when new technology was invented such as bows and arrows/nets/traps).

 

Re humans cooking food:- What is most interesting is that the most common argument re cooked-foods is that humans needed to eat cooked-foods in more northerly climes. Yet, the tribes which eat the highest proportion of raw (animal) foods also, not coincidentally,  happen to live near the Arctic, such as the Nenets or the Inuit.

 

Re smell/taste of cooked-foods:- I actually provided a perfect explanation for why humans might be addicted to eat and enjoy the taste of cooked-foods. Namely that, highly addictive opioids/opiates exist in all processed foods, particularly grains, dairy and cooked-foods, which act on the human brain, thus causing them to prefer cooked-foods, much like humans enjoy  getting high on cocaine or marijuana etc.(albeit, perhaps on a lower level). To take bears, for example, wild bears often go in for eating all sorts of junk-food at campsites , such as additive-ridden candy-bars which no cooked-Palaeo-enthusiast could possibly remotely justify as being a "healthy" food of any kind for a bear. I'm thinking of a recent news-story where a wild bear completely destroyed a car just to get at  two chocolate bars - but there are many such examples of other wildlife such as urban foxes etc.

 

Mind you, it doesn't seem to always apply to all across the animal kingdom. Flies, for example, seem to be much more attracted to the smell of my raw meats than to any cooked-dishes that others eat next to me. That may be due to the fact that flies need to lay their eggs on raw meats, though, with cooked meats being presumably less than ideal re hatching.

 

There is, of course, another issue:- wild animals, unlike humans, do not have regular, plentiful food-sources available, so will be bound to eat any old crappy junk-food as long as that prevents them from experiencing starvation and death.


Of course, taste is also heavily determined by one's habits. For example, a common story told by many RAFers/Rawpalaeodieters is that they would sneak into the kitchen as toddlers/young children and occasionally steal pieces of raw meats to eat(the taste of which they enjoyed at the time). Then, after years of eating cooked-food, they became so accustomed to eating cooked-foods that they took time to get used to eating raw meats again when they eventually turned to RAF diets. I was no exception. At age 4-5, I would sneak into the kitchen to grab pieces of raw pig's kidney and found it quite tasty, yet, decades later, it took me a number of months to get used to eating raw pig's kidney again. Of course, now that I've got into the habit of a RAF diet, the prospect/taste of cooked-food is much less enticing by comparison to raw meats, to put it mildly.

 

Geoff









 
> Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 08:45:06 -0500
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: 1. "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" by Richard Wrangham
> To: [log in to unmask]
> 
> I have one big problem with your arguments, Geoff, and that is that all over
> the Earth, the vast majority of people cook their foods, and have so for as
> long as we have record. We also have plenty of evidence from scorched bones
> etc that paleo people did cook at least some of their food.
> 
> I think Wrangham exaggerates in order to make a name for himself, but that
> doesn't mean he is all wrong.
> 
> Very primitive people made quite nice stone tools, showing that they were
> pretty darn clever. They must have had considerable material culture of wood
> etc that doesn't remain in the fossil record. It is not at all hard to
> imagine a flint knapper observing the sparks cast as he whacks one stone
> against another. In dry conditions an occasional spark can easily start
> smoking and even catch fire.
> 
> Humans do use fire and do cook their food. The groups that don't cook their
> food are so rare as to almost be legendary, Eskimos eat a lot of raw food,
> but cook some. Supposedly, Andaman Islanders don't use fire at all. I am not
> sure I believe that. Also, Tasmanian aboriginals supposedly didn't use fire.
> Know any others?
> 
> Perhaps you have trouble understanding why people would bother to cook, but
> simply the smell and taste difference between cooked and raw meat explains
> it all to me. Even wild carnivores are trapped using cooked meat. Why would
> they come by at all if it didn't smell good?
> 
> Tom

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