A number of commonly eaten foods are toxic unless cooked.
These include taro roots and leaves (full of sharp little oxalic acid crystals)* and cassava (unless you want to ingest hydrogen cyanide).
Pokeweed is a popular spring green in some rural areas, but needs to be properly cooked to neutralize both oxalic acid and phytolaccatoxin.
Red kidney beans must be adequately cooked, otherwise they contain dangerous levels of phytohemagglutinin.
*this is also why you shouldn’t chew on diffenbachia stems, should you get the urge. The oral numbness and choking sensation this can cause is the reason for the common name “mother-in-law’s tongue”.
You can Google animal skin used for boiling water and get several results. One method of boiling is to simply keep throwing hot rocks into the bag until the water starts to boil. But apparently as long as the skin is filled with water it won’t ignite even over an open flame.
Quite a number of early cultures cook items by wrapping them in large leaves, usually burying them under a fire rather than exposing them to open flame. But I’m imagining early pottery would be bulky and fragile so larger pots were not too suitable for nomads, not to mention the need to build a kiln for quality pottery. The counterpoint is that some early cultures, before the advent of deliberate agriculture, lived in areas rich enough to allow hunter-gatherer life without needing to move regularly - perhaps seasonally settling in a single location. Regardless, long term settlement has its benefits.
Pacific Northwest natives come to mind, the salmon run and fishing provided sufficient food for relatively permanent settlements with elaborate sturdy longhouses. They only needed to move to the various salmon runs for a short season.
As mentioned upthread, not only did humans evolve the ability to take advantage of cook meat, but eating cooked meat appears to be a pivotal step in the subsequent evolution of our advanced brains.
I’m shocked by the suggestion that we can eat raw vegetables and not raw meats, because in my experience, the opposite is true. Potatoes, yams, other tubers, many beans, heck, most grains are indigestible or even toxic raw, whereas raw meat is easy to digest (and it took formal studies to show any benefit from cooking) and the only real problem with it is pathogens, something more problematic to modern humans who slaughter many animals in the same place and then store and ship the raw meat.
Fwiw, when i buy a large cut of meat to stew, i often cut small bits from the cleaner interior and eat them raw as i prepare the meal. Raw beef is delicious. Raw lamb is pleasant.
Nomads don’t wander at random, generally; they travel mostly among known places. Grinding stones, I think, were simply left at those places which were used at the times of year for grinding grains. Might not pots have been similarly left at frequent stopping points?
Yup.
Cooking food greatly expanded what we were able to eat.
I find it really interesting that we managed to figure out which foods needed which treatments.
Not that we always get it perfectly right – I’ve met people who were under the impression that all beans are toxic if eaten raw, including fresh snap beans*, which definitely aren’t (at least in their modern versions, I can’t speak for their ancestors.)
*I’d write “green beans”, except that some of them are yellow, purple, or combinations of both. They’re all “green” in the sense of being unripe, though.
I thought it was the HUNTING of food that gave us the big brains. Bc in order to hunt you had to be smart and strategize. This giving the big brain people an advantage over the other species and making us more prolific.
Specifically, human intelligence and brain size increased when we shifted from hunting large, slow animals (because we killed many off) to hunting small, fast ones, which required more cunning and strategy. Therefore, it is not hunting itself, but the type of prey that we hunted, that influenced our cognitive evolution.
Plenty of less intelligent critters hunt in packs. But those critters are also the ones that build social structures. Which itself takes a certain sort of intelligence & cooperative nature.
Even primitive humans were head and shoulders more capable in making groups and therefore in hunting than was any competitive species. Once we found our secret sauce we really ran with it. Which is enough of a feedback loop that it’s hard to make simple cause-effect arguments; the arrow of causation is mostly self-reinforcingly circular, not linear.
An advantage over all the myriad of other species of hunters, who manage with smaller and sometimes quite tiny brains?
And large brains are very useful in successful gathering; and the ability to tell somebody else ‘those are the trees that will fruit even in a dry year’ could easily be lifesaving. Also the ability to say ‘don’t eat that unless you boil it in three waters first!’
Large animals are generally dangerous to hunt, thereby requiring more cunning and strategy.
Small animals are also hunted by very large numbers of other species with a wide assortment of brain size.
I’m finding it difficult to accept that humans hunted large animals before small ones. I can see a period when humans shifted from small animals to larger ones with the development of larger and thrown pointed sticks, and later shifting back to smaller animals for various reasons. But humans would have run down rabbits before running down wooly mammoths.
And we know that humans drove shellfish to extinction locally because they left mountains of shells behind. I think humans brain development was driven more by the need to hunt different kinds of food in different locales and as the environment changed. The changes were frequent, changes to the size, type of prey, and hunting techniques. Adaptability in general was being developed, not just specific skills based on the size of the prey or any single factor.
I agree it takes cunning and strategy to hunt large dangerous animals. But, I disagree that it takes more cunning and strategy than hunting small, fast animals—I believe it takes less. The timing of humans increase in brain size coincides with our hunting small game.
From my previously linked article: Comparing the size of animals found in archaeological cultures, representing different species of humans in east Africa, southern Europe and Israel, the researchers found that in all cases there was a significant decline in the prevalence of animals weighing over 200kg, coupled with an increase in the volume of the human brain.
Also, many more small animals would need to be hunted to sustain a group of humans. One large animal can sustain a group for a long time.
Yes, but those animals hunting small game are generally more physically adapted to catch small prey than humans (i.e. they are as fast as their prey or have other physical advantages). Humans, on the other hand, must rely on intelligence to catch prey faster than them.
Humans do have a physical advantage over large prey—we have better endurance and can therefore pursue them to exhaustion, or run them off a cliff.