That is a rather unlikely scenario. For one thing, humans in those days were not even humans, they were extremely primitive apemen, not too much different from other wild animals. And, just like wild animals, they would have had a great, uncontrollable terror of fire. And, let's face it, our apemen ancestors couldn't easily learn how to make fire by learning from Nature, as they could hardly recreate lightning bolts striking wood/trees, could they?

 

And natural wildfires certainly couldn't have been anywhere near common enough for apemen to develop a taste for cooked meats, on a regular basis.

 

 

Naturally, since there is no obvious proven benefit re eating cooked-foods given all the disadvantages involved, people like Wrangham have tried desperately to claim that eating cooked food led to greater hominid brain-size. Unfortunately, quite aside from the other numerous objections, the invention of fire, in and of itself, is such an extremely complex process to arrive at and control, that it takes a rather evolved brain to make sense of it in the first place, thus further boosting the notion that fire was only invented at a much later date in the Palaeolithic era than Wrangham et al have claimed.

 

Geoff

 

 

 

 








 
> Date: Sat, 16 May 2009 07:04:24 -0600
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: 1. "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" by Richard Wrangham
> To: [log in to unmask]
> 
> On Sat, 16 May 2009 05:41:27 -0600, Geoffrey Purcell 
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> 
> > The real problem with the notion of inventing cooking is that Palaeo 
> > hominids had no previous example to start from,
> Actually I don't think that's true. Wildfires were probably common enough 
> on the savannah even before matches were invented. A hungry human might 
> easily have eaten from a freshly killed and lightly scorched antelope. 
> Even some scorched tubers, pods, etc., might have
> been eaten. It isn't as if fire was invented de novo on a human hearth.
> 
> Lynnet

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