Fire Control by Early Humans 6
Fire Control by Early Humans 6 : Changes to behavior: Making fire with flintstones. An important change in the behavior of humans was brought about by the control of fire and its accompanying light. Activity was no longer restricted to the daylight hours. In addition, some mammals and biting insects avoid fire and smoke. Fire also led to improved nutrition by cooked proteins. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University argues that cooking of plant foods may have triggered brain expansion by allowing complex carbohydrates in starchy foods to become more digestible and in effect allow humans to absorb more food energy. Wrangham has also suggested that eating cooked food is more "natural" for the human digestive system, because he thinks that the human digestive system may have evolved to deal with cooked foods, and that cooking explains the increase in hominid brain sizes, smaller digestive tract, smaller teeth and jaws and decrease in sexual dimorphism that occurred roughly 1. 8 million years ago. He also argues that raw meat and vegetables could not have provided the necessary energy to support the normal hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Other anthropologists oppose Wrangham, stating that archeological evidence suggests that cooking fires began in earnest only 250,000 BP, when ancient hearths, earth ovens, burnt animal bones, and flint appear across Europe and the Middle East. Two million years ago, the only sign of fire is burnt earth with human remains, which most other anthropologists consider to be mere coincidence rather than evidence of intentional fire. The mainstream view among anthropologists is that the increases in human brain-size occurred well before the advent of cooking, due to a shift away from the consumption of nuts and berries to the consumption of meat. (1) Changes to diet: Because of the indigestible components of plants such as raw cellulose and starch, some parts of the plant such as stems, mature leaves, enlarged roots, and tubers would not have been part of the hominid diet prior to the advent of fire. Instead, the consumption of plants would be limited to parts that were made of simpler sugars and carbohydrates such as seeds, flowers, and fleshy fruits. The incorporation of toxins into the seeds and similar carbohydrate sources also affected the diet, as cyanogenic glycosides such as those found in linseed and cassava are made non-toxic through cooking
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