A Very Meaty Evolution

Not Geography Geography Lesson 1

Ape + Meat + Fire = Man..?

For the first in my 'Not Geography Geography Lessons', I have chosen to discuss something which I only learnt this week, during one of my new degree modules - Food and Agriculture in the 21st Century (a strange choice admittedly) - which concerns the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens (that's us) from Austrapithicines/ape-like creatures (only a very small percentage of us, mostly racists and bigots). Joking aside, this is actually a really interesting topic that the majority of everyday people don't think about and don't know much about outside of Darwin's Evolution of  Species. So:

There are two early hominid species which are thought to be the descendants of modern-day humans: 

(1.) Austrapithicines (Apes) --> (2.) Habilines (missing link species) --> (3.) Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

Up until quite recently, the idea of something other than Darwin's traditional 'survival of the fittest' being the key driver to this evolution, was largely unheard of. It was established that moving from cultures wherein food sources were mainly vegetarian (nuts, fruits, vegetables, scavenged meat) to knife-wielding hunter-gathers had facilitated this first leap. Hence - Austrapithicines + Meat = Habilines. 

Now things get a bit odd, because scientists then largely ignored the second evolutionary jump, and put it down to hominids generally becoming smarter and changing physiologically. BUT, recent research has revealed that something did change to enable that second jump; and that thing is fire. The average UK resident eats around 84kg of meat per year, and chances are that not once during the consumption of that meat, does the average man stop and think 'the process of me cooking and eating this meat is the very same one that allowed my descendants 0.8 million years ago to evolve into me'. That very thought however, is now the widely accepted theory as to how we made that last jump from the missing links, and the process of that is where it gets really interesting...

Researchers have directly attributed our descendants' ability to create fire, and use that fire to cook their food as the main cause of our physiological and social evolution as humans today. Because:

• Cooked meat is softer and easier to chew and digest than raw meat = changes to our digestive system and smaller jaws (and smaller jaws = more space for a bigger brain!)
• Cooking meat can kill bacteria and disease = fewer deaths from woolly mammoth sushi.
• Cooking for people tends to make them like you = increased sociality and better social systems. 

And so... we can all thank that one habiline in his cave who decided to try something new and BBQ his mammoth, and inadvertently led to the evolution of his species into modern-day man. Let's all have a sausage on him! 

*If you want to read more about it, try Richard Wrangham's book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003F5NSVK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)*