EVOLUTION Case for (Very) Early Cooking Heats Up Nearly two million years ago our ancestors began to barbecue. And those hot meals, Richard Wrangham argues, are what made us human ·By Kate Wong on...

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Extracted text: EVOLUTION Case for (Very) Early Cooking Heats Up Nearly two million years ago our ancestors began to barbecue. And those hot meals, Richard Wrangham argues, are what made us human ·By Kate Wong on September 1, 2013 IN BRIEF Who: Richard Wrangham Vocation | Avocation: Anthropologist Where: Harvard University Research Focus: Chimpanzee behavior, ecology and physiology, which contribute to understanding human evolution Big Picture: Cooking made us human. With our supersized brains and shrunken teeth and guts, we humans are bizarre primates. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University has long argued that these and other peculiar traits of our kind arose as humans turned to cooking to improve food quality–making it softer and easier to digest and thus a richer source of energy. Humans, unlike any other animal, cannot survive on raw food in the wild, he observes. “We need to have our food cooked." Based on the anatomy of our fossil forebears, Wrangham thinks that Homo erectus had mastered cooking with fire by 1.8 million ago. Critics have countered that he lacks уears


Extracted text: How does a raw food diet put children'shealth at risk? O Insufficient calories for brain growth. O It doesn't. Animals eat a raw diet and humans are animals. O all of these are correct O Our guts and teeth are larger than early hominins and therefore better adapted to meat cating.