Re: Fire/Cooking -> Bigger Brains - erectus

On Dec 24, 9:41 am, Rich Travsky <traRvE...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=cooking-up-bigger-brains
Scientific American Magazine - January, 2008
Cooking Up Bigger Brains
Our hominid ancestors could never have eaten enough raw food to support our
large, calorie-hungry brains, Richard Wrangham claims. The secret to our
evolution, he says, is cooking

Absurd. Cart before the horse. Cooking requires control of fire.
Control of fire--as with tool manufacturing--requires an intellect
that already has consciousness and the ability think in terms of
concepts that can be communicated from one indivdual to another.

Evidence indicates cooking emerged at earliest about 2mya. By this
time hominids had already evolved and intellect that was capable
conceptual thinking--as is evident in tools.

<snip>

"I tend to think about human evolution through the lens of chimps," he remarks.

Big mistake.

Wrangham's theory would fit together nicely if not for that pesky problem of
controlled fire.

<snip>

This is, and has been for quite some time, a dead issue.
.

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