Since I was in 7th grade, I've always had a fascination of history. It's just really interesting to look backwards and try to piece together things that have happened to see how we got to this point right now.
As you've read in the past on this blog, I'm a big supporter of following diets such as a paleo diet, and on occasion, follow intermittent fasting, and follow simple workouts because I think that's what our body was designed to do.
This is an interesting article that theorizes that when we started cooking our food, we really put ourselves on the fast track to evolving as humans.
First, when we moved from eating a straight vegetarian diet to more meat, that was the starting point of moving from chimp to a form of human:
It is already accepted that the introduction of meat into our ancestors' diet caused their brains to grow and their intelligence to increase.
Meat - a more concentrated form of energy - not only meant bigger brains for our ancestors, but also an end to the need to devote nearly all their time to foraging to maintain energy levels.
As a consequence, more time was available for social structure to develop.
This part of human history just never seems to have changed: we were always looking for ways to simplify things in order to have more time to do other "stuff." We strive to do that every day in our own lives today.
But, it might have been when the history of cooking was born based on an "accident" that really moved us forward:
Harvard Professor Richard Wrangham believes there is more to it than simply discovering meat.
He thinks that it is not so much a change in the ingredients of our diet, but the way in which we prepare them that has caused the radical evolution of our species.
"I think cooking is arguably the biggest increase in the quality of the diet in the whole of the history of life," he says.
"Our ancestors most probably dropped food in fire accidentally. They would have found it was delicious and that set us off on a whole new direction."
How many times have you heard about the history of an invention and you almost always here the start of the story with "Well, it kind of came together by accident."
Think of how many times you've been cooking something and added something that you shouldn't have and you find that it actually enhances the taste of it.
It sends off that little light in your head that says "hey, I just made something new by screwing up."
The most momentous shift however, happened 1.8 million years ago when Homo erectus - our first "truly human" ancestor arrived on the scene.
Homo erectus had an even bigger brain, smaller jaws and teeth.
Erectus also had a similar body shape to us. Shorter arms and longer legs appeared, and gone was the large vegetable-processing gut, meaning that Erectus could not only walk upright, but could also run.
He was cleverer and faster, and - according to Professor Wrangham - he had learned how to cook.
"Cooking made our guts smaller," he says. "Once we cooked our food, we didn't need big guts.
"They're costly in terms of energy. Individuals that were born with small guts were able to save energy, have more babies and survive better."
Professor Peter Wheeler from Liverpool John Moores University and his colleague, Leslie Aiello, think it was this change in our digestive system that specifically allowed our brains to get larger.
Must be the nerd in me but I find this stuff really interesting because it begs the question, what would have happened if this "accident" didn't occur? Or what would have happened if they wouldn't have learned from that food accidentally falling into the fire and they would have continued to eat meat raw? Would it have not mattered and at some point we still would have figured it out?
I guess it comes down to the fact that even millions of years ago, something as simple as a piece of meat falling into the fire could very well have changed how humans developed and probably shows that through all the human forms we have gone through in the millions of years of human evolution, we still have one thing that hasn't changed: the ability to learn and adapt.
Always keep that in mind. You can adapt to situations before you are forced too. If you need to lose weight, then change your behavior and adapt to it. Your body can do it, you just need to convince your will that you can.
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