Cooked Meat Made Us Human

Somewhere between 1 and 2 million years ago, our ancestors learned to control fire and cook meat. This single innovation may have done more to shape who we are than almost anything else in human history.

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For the last five decades, we’ve been told that meat, especially red meat, is somehow bad for us. We are told, even today with a much better understanding of biology and nutrition, that the “ethical” and “healthy” choice is to move away from meat. We are assured that our ancestors were mostly peaceful plant-eaters until some terrible fall into carnivory.

This is absolute modern myth-making.

The archaeological and anthropological evidence tells a very different story.

Somewhere between 1 and 2 million years ago, our ancestors (likely Homo erectus or earlier hominins) learned to control fire and began cooking meat regularly. According to anthropologist Richard Wrangham, this often involved scavenging or stealing kills, or portions of kills, from other predators, and then cooking what they had taken. This was one of the most radical transitions in human evolutionary history.

Two Enormous Consequences

First: Dramatic increase in caloric efficiency.
Both raw meat and raw fruits/vegetables are tough, fibrous, and relatively hard for our bodies to fully digest. Our fellow great apes spend up to 18 hours a day foraging and chewing just to get enough calories. Cooking meat (and to a lesser extent, certain plants) breaks down proteins, collagen, and tough fibers, making nutrients far more bioavailable. Suddenly our ancestors didn’t need to spend their entire waking lives eating. This freed up enormous amounts of time and energy.

Second: Brain growth.
The human brain is an extremely expensive organ. It consumes about 20% of our total energy despite making up only ~2% of our body weight. Cooked meat provided the dense, high-quality calories and nutrients (especially fats and proteins) necessary to support that energy-hungry brain. Over time, this dietary shift correlates strongly with significant increases in brain size and complexity in the human lineage. We have significantly more brain mass per pound of body weight than any other great ape.

Cooked meat didn’t just help us survive.
It helped make us human.

A Modern Irony

The dietary guidelines produced and beloved by the administrative state are objectively wrong and stand biology on its head. You know, the ones that heavily emphasize grains, fruits, and vegetables while treating meat (especially red meat) as something to be minimized. This stands in direct opposition to everything archaeology, anthropology, and human biology tell us about the diets that actually produced modern humans.

Our ancestors didn’t become human by eating like modern vegans recommend. Or even the American Heart Association recommendations. They became human when they learned to cook meat. The modern dietary guidelines pushed by the administrative state are only possible in today’s industrial world of cheap refined grains, year-round fruits and vegetables from global supply chains, and heavily fortified processed foods. Our biology evolved in a very different nutritional environment.

We can debate the ethics and environmental impacts of modern meat production. Those are legitimate conversations. But pretending that meat itself is somehow unnatural or antithetical to human health is historical and biological illiteracy.

Our ancestors learned to control fire and cook meat somewhere between 1 and 2 million years ago.

That discovery didn’t just feed them.

It helped turn them into us.

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Further Reading

• Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009) — The definitive popular book on the cooking hypothesis and the scavenging-to-cooking transition.

• Wrangham’s academic papers on the “cooking hypothesis,” including the idea that early humans were stealing kills from other predators before cooking them. For example, this piece at NIH: Cooking as a Biological Trait

• NPR coverage is pretty good, also. For example “When Fire Met Food”

• Polymathic Being: “Veganism: A First-World Luxury” by Michael Woudenberg

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#FifthBranch #Veganism #EatingMeat #HowWeBecameHuman

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