No, not really. I don’t think improved health and survival are the reasons humans starting cooking, I think improved health and survival is the result of cooking.
Sure, but again the reasons for something and the benefits of it are not necessarily one and the same.
Sure, I’ll go with that. I still think cooking would not have caught on so much if it weren’t for cooked food tasting better and/or being more enjoyable to eat; I’ll grant that texture may be as big a part as flavor here.
I think this is what I said. I wasn’t assigning motives to the cooking (I cover that later), but rather stated that the reason the behavior persisted is that it offered an advantage – those that did it were selected.
I think it is a big assumption that the first cooked meal was tasty. The whole concept of taste could have developed much later. The very first cooked meal was most likely the result of an accident, and I think the two most likely motivations for repeating the behavior were 1) things that used to be inedible are now easy to eat and b) the gods are in the fire and now they have touched the food. The former is common anthropological speculation, and of course the burning of edible offerings has been a widespread practice. Note how rarely ancients burnt inedible offerings. In the end, people who found some reason for doing it stuck around, and the rest crossed the proverbial river.
People do lick each others butts. Not necessarily after they drop a duece, but they do it. (I’d post a cite, but I’m sure the results would not be safe for work.)
While I agree that we have a society-wide case of OCD, I have a hard time accepting the idea that we would benefit from spraying our kids with animal waste and licking each others butts. I tried to find the column that discussed the threat of sterility from the overuse of chlorine. (I failed.) I seem to recall the final word being that a chance of sterility or reduced fertility is far better than cholera.
A lot of our supposed fragility comes form acculturation.
From Cecil’s column about feral children:
We learn to behave in ways that are appropriate to our society and that includes wearing clothing and sleeping in beds, for example. Raised outside of our cushy environments, we would behave much differently and, most likely, live much shorter lives.
That damned yellow sun saps our super powers to where we’re no more powerful than anyone else.
What do you mean? Digital watches are neat
Meandering around and responding to stuff I read in this thread at random:
As for cooking or not cooking, I really doubt that it’s necessary for fresh meat, assuming the animal wasn’t diseased to begin with. How do you deal with gristle? Chew what you can, spit out the rest, just like you do with cooked food. And as for everyone not getting filet… eh, we don’t all get filet as it is. People in New York pride themselves on inventing a food product made out of intestines. Hell, I can’t AFFORD any cut of beef with “filet” in the label. If you season it and tenderize it right (as in “Thug likes to hit food with rock.”) then it’s still just fine to eat.
The advantage to cooking, salting, or pickling mainly is in relation to how long you can keep the meat before you have to eat it. Also, for many folks, it does indeed taste better, especially if you season the meat before hand with various things which release their flavor when heated. In the US, we cook most of our meat partially because that’s how we’ve always eaten our meat (tradition need not make any sense for it to be a perfectly valid reason to do something), and because we rarely get fresh cow anymore.
Actually, we have a normal digestive system for an omnivore. Ruminants can digest grass, sure, but they really can’t eat meat. Carnivores can eat meat that is more “off” than we can- but that’s because their system is shorter, not longer.
On Preview, I see that **Stranger On A Train ** has said what I have writeen and was going to write, but better.