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Why do we have to cook our food? Like, plenty of animals thrive eating raw foods, so why do humans need to cook their foods? Besides the obvious of not getting sick, I know that. I also just realized, I don't think I can ask this without looking like an idiot, but whatever, nothing new
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Apr 18, 2023 00:32
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Leave posted:Why do we have to cook our food? Like, plenty of animals thrive eating raw foods, so why do humans need to cook their foods? Besides the obvious of not getting sick, I know that. I also just realized, I don't think I can ask this without looking like an idiot, but whatever, nothing new We technically don't have to but figuring out how to cook food gave us access to new sources of food we couldn't normally chew or digest.
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Apr 18, 2023 00:34
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Cooking is like pre-digestion. It takes less energy for the human body to get more energy and some nutrients out of the food when it's cooked.
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Apr 18, 2023 00:37
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I do find that fascinating too, like who were the first cavemen to cook food and why did they try it? Knowledge of fermentation seems like an accidental, pre-civilization thing (loads of animals eat rotten fruit to get buzzed) but cooking, to me, seems like it would have to be more deliberate. Did a bison get hit by lightning or something and the cavemen who scavenged its meat just really liked the taste?Mike Fallopian posted:Depends on the nutrient, I don't think you'll get anything but caloric information from burning something generally. I would assume that they blend of up and separate it out chemically, or for artificial food they just add up the ingredients. Right, I should have known you can only get caloric content from burning. And yeah, I imagine basically all of this stuff is based on publicly-available records of things. Kind of reminds me of a time I was bored at work and started reading the MSDS sheets for our cleaning products; one of them had the LD50 values for ethyl alcohol in it. I'm pretty sure there aren't scientists out there still getting bunnies so drunk they die every time a new floor cleaning fluid comes out. Least I hope not.
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Apr 18, 2023 00:51
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Cooked food is also a lot easier on your teeth, which is important when you live as long as we do.
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Apr 18, 2023 00:51
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Mister Speaker posted:I do find that fascinating too, like who were the first cavemen to cook food and why did they try it? Knowledge of fermentation seems like an accidental, pre-civilization thing (loads of animals eat rotten fruit to get buzzed) but cooking, to me, seems like it would have to be more deliberate. Did a bison get hit by lightning or something and the cavemen who scavenged its meat just really liked the taste? Could be as simple as someone dropped their elk haunch on a hot rock near a camp fire and hey that smells kinda good. Figuring out to boil plants and grains probably took a little more thought. Also, like a pot or something.
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Apr 18, 2023 00:53
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People are fascinated by fire, plus it has obvious utility in helping you keep warm. So you'll want to live near fire. And then you'll probably experiment with sticking things in the fire and seeing what happens. Oh hey, this tastes better if you stick it in the fire first!
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Apr 18, 2023 00:58
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Hey this milk sitting in the cows stomach bag I made tastes really good!
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Apr 18, 2023 01:03
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Mister Speaker posted:Kind of reminds me of a time I was bored at work and started reading the MSDS sheets for our cleaning products; one of them had the LD50 values for ethyl alcohol in it. lol I remember reading an MSDS for lab grade ethanol and it was like "accidental ingestion by mouth can cause loss of precise motor control, slurred speech, cognitive difficulties..."
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Apr 18, 2023 01:11
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McCracAttack posted:Computer chairs: the backbone of a good sit up. I totally missed this post somehow. Thanks for the thread link!
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Apr 18, 2023 01:13
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George H.W. oval office posted:Hey this milk sitting in the cows stomach bag I made tastes really good! I'm confident most of our food discoveries throughout history came down to, "Yes I am hungry and desperate enough to eat that."
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Apr 18, 2023 01:16
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Mister Speaker posted:I do find that fascinating too, like who were the first cavemen to cook food and why did they try it? McCracAttack posted:Could be as simple as someone dropped their elk haunch on a hot rock near a camp fire and hey that smells kinda good. Figuring out to boil plants and grains probably took a little more thought. Also, like a pot or something. pretty sure i read somewhere that it started with people scavenging animals that were caught in grass/brush fires and noticing that their cooked/charred meat tasted a lot better and was easier to digest. so then they started doing it themselves. boiling stuff likely came quite a bit later.
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Apr 18, 2023 01:20
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:People are fascinated by fire, plus it has obvious utility in helping you keep warm. So you'll want to live near fire. And then you'll probably experiment with sticking things in the fire and seeing what happens. Oh hey, this tastes better if you stick it in the fire first!
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Apr 18, 2023 01:20
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McCracAttack posted:I'm confident most of our food discoveries throughout history came down to, "Yes I am hungry and desperate enough to eat that." I still wonder about the first human's thought process leading them to decide to try an oyster. Or some of the grosser Scandinavian delicacies around fermented sea life.
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Apr 18, 2023 01:24
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The best guess for this that I ever heard was that the genetic bottleneck that made humans what we are today, was caused by a massive supervolcano. Lotsa cooked everything and fire. Cooked food was a huge step to making our big brains and helped with our relatively long periods of childrearing. Fire drives on the African savannah, boiling geothermal lakes, it's fun to speculate!Tad Naff posted:I still wonder about the first human's thought process leading them to decide to try an oyster. Or some of the grosser Scandinavian delicacies around fermented sea life. Why do infants have a swimming reflex or hold their breath instinctively when submerged?
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Apr 18, 2023 01:26
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Support NPR! https://www.radiolab.org/podcast/91696-new-nice As humans became domesticated our jaws shrank too, necessitating that predigestion.
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Apr 18, 2023 01:29
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Leave posted:Why do we have to cook our food? Like, plenty of animals thrive eating raw foods, so why do humans need to cook their foods? Besides the obvious of not getting sick, I know that. I also just realized, I don't think I can ask this without looking like an idiot, but whatever, nothing new Without cooking we’d spend way more time eating way more food for the same nutritional content. These days in the first world it’d just be boring and annoying, but elsewhere and elsetime that’s a significant survival drain. IIRC thanks to our massive brains we proportionally need a lot more energy than other animals, so we need every advantage we could get. Edit: and yeah, we’ve been relying on cooking long enough that we’ve evolved in response to it
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Apr 18, 2023 01:30
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Tad Naff posted:I still wonder about the first human's thought process leading them to decide to try an oyster. Or some of the grosser Scandinavian delicacies around fermented sea life. I can't explain the Scandinavian stuff, no one can, but animals eat shellfish so someone watched an otter chowing down on a bunch of oysters and decided to get in on it.
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Apr 18, 2023 01:32
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Tad Naff posted:I still wonder about the first human's thought process leading them to decide to try an oyster. Or some of the grosser Scandinavian delicacies around fermented sea life. I feel like my hypothesis still explains those examples. mllaneza posted:I can't explain the Scandinavian stuff, no one can, ... Oh look at their majesty too good to eat something they pissed on and buried in the sand last fall.
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Apr 18, 2023 01:36
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dupersaurus posted:Without cooking we’d spend way more time eating way more food for the same nutritional content. These days in the first world it’d just be boring and annoying, but elsewhere and elsetime that’s a significant survival drain. IIRC thanks to our massive brains we proportionally need a lot more energy than other animals, so we need every advantage we could get. Thanks for this and all the other great answers. I knew cooking "unlocked" nutrients or whatever, but I never connected that to our brains utilizing those nutrients.
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Apr 18, 2023 01:59
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Here's a thing I don't understand. Why do people insist Neanderthals went extinct if we've got their dna in us? Is this just an arbitrary line drawn out of homo sapiens arrogance? You cross a lion and a tiger and you call it a liger. How did homo sapiens get to keep his name, absorbing other hominids without apparently losing his essence?
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Apr 18, 2023 02:02
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Flipperwaldt posted:Here's a thing I don't understand. Why do people insist Neanderthals went extinct if we've got their dna in us? Is this just an arbitrary line drawn out of homo sapiens arrogance? You cross a lion and a tiger and you call it a liger. How did homo sapiens get to keep his name, absorbing other hominids without apparently losing his essence? I think it's a fairly recent discovery that they didn't go extinct but rather probably interbred with homo sapiens sapiens, so popular discourse is probably lagging the actual science.
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Apr 18, 2023 02:13
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Flipperwaldt posted:Here's a thing I don't understand. Why do people insist Neanderthals went extinct if we've got their dna in us? Is this just an arbitrary line drawn out of homo sapiens arrogance? You cross a lion and a tiger and you call it a liger. How did homo sapiens get to keep his name, absorbing other hominids without apparently losing his essence? More Raidiolab: https://radiolab.org/podcast/why-fish-dont-exist
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Apr 18, 2023 02:15
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George H.W. oval office posted:Hey this milk sitting in the cows stomach bag I made tastes really good! More like it objectively tastes not really great, but it is tolerable and it doesn't make me sick and it feeds me and it lasts quite a long time which is a massive advantage. And part of the human condition is becoming accustomed to stuff that at first is unpleasant but then becomes tolerable.
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Apr 18, 2023 02:18
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sometimes you just wanna suck a titty
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Apr 18, 2023 02:20
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Apr 18, 2023 02:23
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McCracAttack posted:I feel like my hypothesis still explains those examples. actually this poison shark that's rotted so much it 360'd all the way back to being technically edible is good
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Apr 18, 2023 02:36
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i think a lot of times the answer to "why did people try eating this weird stuff" is that they had no other choice the scandinavian affection for fermented fish comes from fermentation making things last longer and since it's a region where most of nature is frozen half the year, it's pretty useful to have some fish that lasts awhile so you dont have to go out catch something fresh in the middle of a blizzard. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 02:38
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alnilam posted:I think it's a fairly recent discovery that they didn't go extinct but rather probably interbred with homo sapiens sapiens, so popular discourse is probably lagging the actual science. I was hoping there was something about dna or lineage I was misunderstanding that explained it better than that. Decedent posted:More Raidiolab:
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Apr 18, 2023 02:44
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Flipperwaldt posted:Here's a thing I don't understand. Why do people insist Neanderthals went extinct if we've got their dna in us? Is this just an arbitrary line drawn out of homo sapiens arrogance? You cross a lion and a tiger and you call it a liger. How did homo sapiens get to keep his name, absorbing other hominids without apparently losing his essence? So yeah defining species can be squishy even when all examples are currently alive, let alone when they’re dead. But if you take a Neanderthal skeleton and compare it to a modern human, even someone untrained can see that they differ quite significantly and there’s no doubt that it’s the modern human lineage that survived. Interbreeding happened and signs of it persist, but I think(?) that’s mostly a European and to a lesser extent Asian trait.
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Apr 18, 2023 02:49
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I believe that the most useful definition of the word "species" is the largest group of organisms where two hybrids are capable of reproducing fertile offspring. Humans and neanderthals are (were), if you adhere rigourously to what I believe is the most useful definition of "species", different genetic groups of the same species. Some researchers call use the terms "homo sapiens sapiens" and "homo sapiens neanderthalis" to distinguish the two groups rather than referring to them as different species. Honestly it comes down to a question of definition, which is the least useful kind of question you can ask in most circumstances. Either way, neanderthals were probably just regular people with pretty significant morphological differences to modern human.
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Apr 18, 2023 03:14
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Flipperwaldt posted:Here's a thing I don't understand. Why do people insist Neanderthals went extinct if we've got their dna in us? Is this just an arbitrary line drawn out of homo sapiens arrogance? You cross a lion and a tiger and you call it a liger. How did homo sapiens get to keep his name, absorbing other hominids without apparently losing his essence? It's mostly a limitation of the fossil record and the "biological species concept". The most common definition for a species is a group of individuals capable of producing viable offspring with each other. This sounds very nice in theory, but in practice nature doesn't segregate itself like this, so you have tons of gaps, edge-cases, and confusion. As it relates to hominids, under that definition we would probably classify Neanderthals as a member of the same species (like how domesticated dogs and wolves are the same species). However, we are very self-centered, and we look at things a lot more detailed when they relate to us. There are definite morphological differences between us and Neanderthals that point to distinct groups, and since they're gone and we're here we like to somewhat arbitraily decide they were a different species. It's all a bit silly.
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Apr 18, 2023 04:37
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Decedent posted:The best guess for this that I ever heard was that the genetic bottleneck that made humans what we are today, was caused by a massive supervolcano. Lotsa cooked everything and fire. Cooked food was a huge step to making our big brains and helped with our relatively long periods of childrearing. Fire drives on the African savannah, boiling geothermal lakes, it's fun to speculate! That doesn't really make any sense. A supervolcano extinction event isn't about everything getting buried in lava pompeii-style (that's only a danger pretty close to the volcano), it's about massive amounts of ash and smoke filling the sky and blocking out the sun for months. For comparison, when non-supervolcano Mt St Helens erupted in 1980, the lava only traveled about 23 miles but the ash cloud traveled this far: 
RPATDO_LAMD fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 05:05
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i dont think a "supervolcano" was remotely necessary for humans to learn about fire and cooking food. wild fires caused by lightning strikes are pretty common in many regions of the world and often leave behind the cooked carcasses of animals, anyone who simply picked one up and started eating would quickly realize that charred meat tastes very good.
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Apr 18, 2023 05:21
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Keeping with the early human development is there any evidence of the first language or what it would have been most similar to?
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Apr 18, 2023 05:34
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Mister Speaker posted:How are macro/micronutrients calculated for a food or food ingredient? I'm assuming it involves taking a sample and burning it or something in a lab. In theory, yes. The device used is called a “bomb calorimeter”. You burn the food in a sealed chamber of pure oxygen and see how much the apparatus heats up. In practice, the government lets you calculate it from the ingredients. You don’t have to test a Twinkie, because someone has already tested the corn syrup and the palm oil and whatever. In either event, you have to apply corrections for things like the relative metabolic efficiency of sugar digestion versus proteins, and subtract things like cellulose that burn but are not digestible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1os4LxbOLU Platystemon fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 06:13
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Thanks dupersaurus, Mike Fallopian, DildenAnders. It makes sense that the naming of species can be fuzzy at the edges to begin with.
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Apr 18, 2023 13:25
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George H.W. oval office posted:Keeping with the early human development is there any evidence of the first language or what it would have been most similar to? No. We don't really know much about anything before Proto-Indo-European, a language spoken sometime between 4500 and 2500 BC, and everything we know about that is inferred from looking at modern languages. There are some other proto-languages that we have some guesses about, but anything before about 20000 BC is totally unknown.
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Apr 18, 2023 14:42
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Language in the pre-writing world is so inaccessible to us that a lot of the scientific community used to think that anyone studying it at all was wasting time and money in a fools errand. Nobody can really even come up with a good estimate of when language developed in the first place the last time I looked into it.
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Apr 18, 2023 16:11
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ultrafilter posted:No. We don't really know much about anything before Proto-Indo-European, a language spoken sometime between 4500 and 2500 BC, and everything we know about that is inferred from looking at modern languages. There are some other proto-languages that we have some guesses about, but anything before about 20000 BC is totally unknown. We have a decent amount of knowledge about Proto-Afro-Asiatic from up to 10 000 BC because of Egyptian writing, but yes. We don't know whether all languages descend from a single origin or whether language developed independently more than once. Nothing but guesswork.
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Apr 18, 2023 16:46
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