Food, Glorious Food

[rogue06]

That's the title of the opening song from the play and movie Oliver! by the half-starved orphan boys awaiting their daily bowl of gruel. It is also the connecting theme of two separate articles concerning evolution.

Source: How early humans' quest for food stoked the flames of evolution

A love of complex smells and flavours gave our ancestors an edge and stopped hangovers

Ancient humans who had the ability to smell and desire more complex aromas, and enjoy food and drink with a sour taste, gained evolutionary advantages over their less-discerning rivals, argue the authors of a new book about the part played by flavour in our development.

Some of the most significant inventions early humans made, such as stone tools and the controlled use of fire, were also partly driven by their pursuit of flavour and a preference for food they considered delicious, according to the new hypothesis.

"This key moment when we decide whether or not to use fire has, at its core, just the tastiness of food and the pleasure it provides. That is the moment in which our ancestors confront a choice between cooking things and not cooking things," said Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University. "And they chose flavour."

Cooked food tasted more delicious than uncooked food -- and that’s why we opted to continue cooking it, he says: not just because, as academics have argued, cooked roots and meat were easier and safer to digest, and rewarded us with more calories.

Some scientists think the controlled use of fire, which was probably adopted a million years ago, was central to human evolution and helped us to evolve bigger brains.

"Having a big brain becomes less costly when you free up more calories from your food by cooking it," said Dunn, who co-wrote Delicious: The Evolution of Flavour and How it Made Us Human with Monica Sanchez, a medical anthropologist.

However, accessing more calories was not the primary reason our ancestors decided to cook food. "Scientists often focus on what the eventual benefit is, rather than the immediate mechanism that allowed our ancestors to make the choice. We made the choice because of deliciousness. And then the eventual benefit was more calories and fewer pathogens."

Human ancestors who preferred the taste of cooked meat over raw meat began to enjoy an evolutionary advantage over others. "In general, flavour rewards us for eating the things we’ve needed to eat in the past," said Dunn.

In particular, people who evolved a preference for complex aromas are likely to have developed an evolutionary advantage, because the smell of cooked meat, for example, is much more complex than that of raw meat. "Meat goes from having tens of aromas to having hundreds of different aroma compounds," said Dunn.

This predilection for more complex aromas made early humans more likely to turn their noses up at old, rotten meat, which often has "really simple smells". "They would have been less likely to eat that food," said Dunn. "Retronasal olfaction is a super-important part of our flavour system."

The legacy of humanity’s remarkable preference for food which has a multitude of aroma compounds is reflected in "high food culture" today, Dunn says. "It’s a food culture that really caters for our ability to appreciate these complexities of aroma. We’ve made this very expensive kind of cuisine that somehow fits into our ancient sensory ability."

At some point, he thinks, humans’ and pigs’ sour taste receptors evolved to reward them if they found and ate decomposing food that tasted sour, especially if it also tasted a little sweet -- because that is how acidic bacteria tastes. And that, in turn, is a sign that the food is fermenting, not putrefying.

"The acid produced by the bacteria kills off the pathogens in the rotten food. So we think that the sour taste on our tongue, and the way we appreciate it, actually may have served our ancestors as a kind of pH strip to know which of these fermented foods was safe," said Dunn.

Human ancestors who were able to accurately identify rotting food that was actually fermenting, and therefore OK to eat, would have had an evolutionary advantage over others, he argues. If they also figured out how to safely ferment food to eat over winter, they further increased their food supply.

The negative consequence of this is that fermented, alcoholic fruit juice, a sort of "proto wine", would also have tasted good -- and that probably led to horrific hangovers.

"At some point, our ancestors evolved a version of the gene that produces the enzyme that breaks down alcohol in our bodies, which is 40 times faster than that of other primates," added Dunn. "And so that really made our ancestors much more able to get the calories out of these fermented drinks, and it would also probably have lessened the extent to which they had hangovers every day from drinking."

Flavour also drove humanity to innovate and explore, Dunn says. He thinks one reason our ancestors were inspired to begin using tools was to get hold of otherwise inaccessible food that tasted delicious: "If you look at what chimpanzees use tools to get, it’s almost always really delicious things, like honey."

Having a portfolio of tools that they could use to find tasty things to eat gave our ancestors the confidence to explore new environments, knowing they would be able to find food, whatever the season threw at them. "It really allows our ancestors to move out into the world and do new things."

Stone tools in particular "fast-forward" the ability of humans to find delicious food. "Once they can hunt, using spears, they have access to this whole world of foods that were not available to them before."

At this point, Dunn thinks humanity’s pursuit of tasty food started to have terrible consequences for other species. "We know that humans around the world hunted species to extinction, once they figured out how to hunt really effectively."

Dunn strongly suspects that the mammals that first went extinct were the most delicious ones. "From what we were able to reconstruct, it looks like the mammoths, mastodons and giant sloths all would have been unusually tasty."



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The second article makes more grandiose assertion -- that they've discovered a Universal Theory of Human Evolution which is based on food. Over the years, I've seen this idea linked to the use of fire, bipedal locomotion, developed eye-hand coordination resulting from throwing rocks and sticks to kill animals, and even the invention of string. So without any further adieu...

Source: Israeli researchers offer new theory on human brain evolution: We were hungry

Archaeologists suggest that as supplies of large animals declined through hunting, early Homo erectus developed the smarts needed to catch smaller, harder-to-trap prey

Israeli researchers have proposed a new theory that it was the need to prey on small animals that drove humans to develop larger brains and become the smartest animal on earth.

The researchers posit that by killing off large animals, an abundant source of much-needed fat, Homo erectus, an ancient human species, was forced to move to chase smaller creatures -- and the smaller they were, the more ingenuity it took to catch enough of them to meet dietary needs. This, in turn, selected for bigger and more capable brains in the species.

In a paper published on the peer-reviewed MDPI website, Miki Ben-Dor and Prof. Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University presented their "unifying" hypothesis that the decline in prey size was the "one driver for many key physiological and cultural phenomena in human prehistory."

The researchers studied the Pleistocene period, covering the period between about 2.6 million to 11.7 thousand years ago, and assessed that there was a relationship between the reduction in the average weight of African animals and the extinction of megafauna, and human brain development in Homo erectus living in the region.

"At the end of this period, humans had established themselves as a species of unprecedented ecological dominance," they wrote in the paper. "Most notable among these changes was the directional increase in brain volume in the lineages leading to Homo sapiens."

That included "the habitual use of fire, periodical change of stone-tool technologies, big-game hunting, resource intensification, food production, and animal and plant domestication."

They suggested that "as prey size declined, humans adapted to acquire and consume smaller and smaller prey" while also adapting to maintain the balance between their biological needs and the energy those needs required, which was obtained from eating.

Humans can’t get all the calories they need by digesting meat, they need fat too. The smaller the animal, the less fat, and the more efficient early humans needed to be at catching them to survive, which required more thought.

Similarly, our proclivity for sour-tasting food and fermented beverages like beer and wine may stem from the evolutionary advantage that eating sour food and drink gave our ancestors.

"Most mammals have sour taste receptors," said Dunn. "But in almost all of them, with very few exceptions, the sour taste is aversive -- so most primates and other mammals, in general, will, if they taste something sour, spit it out. They don’t like it."

Humans are among the few species that like sour, he says, another notable exception being pigs.

"We can’t eat that much protein," Ben-Dor explained to Haaretz in a report published Thursday. "We need fat too. Because we needed the fat, we began with the big animals. We wiped out the prime adults who were crucial to the survival of species. Because of our need for fat, we wiped out the animals we depended on. And this required us to keep getting smarter and smarter, and thus we took over the world."

Another key element of human dominance, language, makes significant demands on the brain but was worth the effort because it enabled cooperation for hunting, Ben-Dor said.

"We just need to follow the money," Ben-Dor said. "When speaking of evolution, one must follow the energy. Language is energetically costly. Speaking requires devotion of part of the brain, which is costly. Our brain consumes huge amounts of energy. It’s an investment, and language has to produce enough benefit to make it worthwhile."

"What did language bring us? It had to be more energetically efficient hunting," he concluded.



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I initially read about this in Haaretz last month, which had a good write up but it is now behind a paywall Anywho... the entire paper, Prey Size Decline as a Unifying Ecological Selecting Agent in Pleistocene Human Evolution is available by clicking the hyperlink. Here is its abstract:

Abstract

We hypothesize that megafauna extinctions throughout the Pleistocene, that led to a progressive decline in large prey availability, were a primary selecting agent in key evolutionary and cultural changes in human prehistory. The Pleistocene human past is characterized by a series of transformations that include the evolution of new physiological traits and the adoption, assimilation, and replacement of cultural and behavioral patterns. Some changes, such as brain expansion, use of fire, developments in stone-tool technologies, or the scale of resource intensification, were uncharacteristically progressive. We previously hypothesized that humans specialized in acquiring large prey because of their higher foraging efficiency, high biomass density, higher fat content, and the use of less complex tools for their acquisition. Here, we argue that the need to mitigate the additional energetic cost of acquiring progressively smaller prey may have been an ecological selecting agent in fundamental adaptive modes demonstrated in the Paleolithic archaeological record. We describe several potential associations between prey size decline and specific evolutionary and cultural changes that might have been driven by the need to adapt to increased energetic demands while hunting and processing smaller and smaller game.

[Cow Poke]

bacon

[mossrose]

Dark chocolate.

[rogue06]

bacon

Dark chocolate.

The things that made us what we are?
[*cue favorite spooky music*]