Fire Control by Early Humans 7
Fire Control by Early Humans 7 : Changes to Behavior: The teeth of H. erectus over time showed gradual shrinking, suggesting that later members of the species transitioned from eating crunchier foods such as crisp root vegetables to softer foods such as meat and various cooked foods. The evidence of cooking of meat comes from burned and blackened animal bones found at various archaeological sites. Wrangham suggested that by cooking meat, it acted as a form of "pre-digestion", allowing less food energy intake to be spent on digesting the tougher proteins such as collagen and the tougher carboyhydrates. The digestive tract shrank, allowing more energy to be given to the growing brain of H. erectus. Suzana Herculano-Houzel calculated that if they ate only raw, unprocessed food, humans would need to eat for 9. 3 hours per day in order to fuel their brains, which use about twice as much resting energy by percentage as other primates. Other scientists disagree with Wrangham's assumption. Neurobiologist John Allman believes that cooking did not affect the brain development of H. erectus, but rather contributed to the development of the brain in Neanderthals and early modernhumans. Paleoanthropologist C. Loring Brace agrees with Allman's theory that cooking did not affect H. erectus development, stating that he has only found evidence of earth-oven cookware from the past 200,000 years, which does not correlate with the earliest known use of fire from 800,000 years ago. Carel van Schaik believes that cooking did contribute to human evolution, but it was not the only factor that led to the increased brain power of modern hominids. Rather, as Leslie Aiello suggests, the changes came in groups; increased consumption of meat, the smaller digestive system, cooking, and upright walking all contributed to the growth of the brain. Dental anthropologist Peter Lucas suggests that the advent of cooking and preparing it by making food easier to chew led to the issues of malocclusion in modern humans and a steady decrease in the size of teeth. Because the food was made smaller, but not less tough, the human jaw shrank too much to adequately fit all of the teeth
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