CARTA: The Evolution of Human Nutrition -- Richard Wrangham: Fire Starch Meat and Honey

University of California Television (UCTV)
University of California Television (UCTV)
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Published 2013-03-21
(Visit: www.uctv.tv/) Unlike all other free-living animals, human populations need to eat much of their food cooked. We now know that cooking causes starch and meat to provide much extra energy; that cooked food saves so much eating time that it makes dedicated hunting possible; and that honey-eating by African hunter-gatherers offers a remarkable clue that the control of fire is an ancient habit. From an evolutionary perspective, Richard Wrangham (Harvard Univ) contends that the special feature of the human diet is not so much its ingredients, as how we prepare them. Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 24839]
All Comments (13)
  • @SSNewberry
    Sometimes particular foods are consumed raw, especially C vitamins. But this is exceptional.
  • @ericarhollis
    @shirehorse91 He is talking about early human adaptions from the time when almost all humans were still in Africa.
  • @Tamizushi
    What I got from this is that if I eat raw it might make it easier to diet.
  • @ThePorkupine73
    Well, a lot of raw foodists have eating disorders. So there's that.
  • @shirehorse91
    There's a problem with extrapolating the diet of South African hunter gathers to the rest of the world given the habitat variance.
  • @CraigCastanet
    the honey birds use tools.............................humans.
  • @Kgeorge86
    He seems to be looking at high fat raw foodists who eat a diet of 80% fat or something... their lack of health might not be due to the food being raw but on just being plain unhealthy.
  • @jamesarness991
    This doesn't make sense. Cooking is such a sophisticated skill requiring us to know how to make and control fire, manage ingredients, prevent them from being destroyed by too much heat, and not becoming distracted and walking away to do something else, that it requires an already developed brain. An ape with a small brain couldn't master cooking in order to develop a large brain. You already have to have a large brain to cook, so forget about this crazy idea.