午夜福利1000集合

THE inhabitants of the Admiralty Islands say that a divine serpent once asked some children to cook a fish. The children dried it in the sun and ate it raw. Seeing this, the serpent gave them fire and taught them to cook.

So it is with every culture: the way that humans acquired fire is enshrined in legend, usually involving either a heroic benefactor or a trickster. In Greek myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and was punished for it; according to the Apache, it was a cunning fox who captured it for us. Once acquired, fire became sacred. In ancient Rome, it was guarded in the temple of Vesta, goddess of the hearth, by the Vestal Virgins. In India鈥檚 Hindu temples, Agnihotri (literally 鈥渇ire-guarder鈥�) Brahmans are still keepers of the sacred flame.

Legends aside, no other animal controls fire. Most fear it. The use of fire sets humans apart. But what difference has it made?

Anthropologist suggests that taming fire led to the evolution of modern humans. Millions of years ago, our ape-like ancestors may have overcome their fear of fire to pick at found delicacies 鈥� maybe an animal accidentally cooked in a forest fire. Over time, they learned how to keep a flame going by feeding it twigs, how to use fire to thwart predators and how to harness it for heat and light. This familiarity with fire, Burton argues, changed the hormonal cycles that depend on light and darkness: light from nightly bonfires may have caused a change in the nocturnal flow of melatonin. Over time, this changed the rates and patterns of our ancestors鈥� growth, and the regulation and activation of genes, leading ultimately to us.

Primatologist , who has been observing chimpanzees in Africa for 40 years, believes it is cooking itself that makes us human. The pre-human species Homo erectus, which evolved in the African savannah roughly 1.8 million years ago, was in many ways similar to us: it had an upright body, long legs, large skull and small gut. As Wrangham puts it, H. erectus could have worn our clothes, unlike the apes that came before it. Scientists usually explain this change in body shape by a change in diet, explaining that learning how to make tools enabled our ancestors to catch more animals. This allowed H. erectus to eat more meat, and because meat has more calories than plants in a given volume, a smaller gut sufficed.

Wrangham disagrees, arguing that humans cannot easily digest raw meat and so our smaller gut must have evolved as a result of cooking. Just look at today鈥檚 raw-food movement, he says: followers of a strict raw-food diet invariably lose weight, even though they do not have to expend the energy that would be required to hunt and gather their food. Our ancestors, who had no such choice, would have starved if they had relied on raw food alone.

鈥淔ollowers of a strict raw-food diet invariably lose weight. Our ancestors would have starved鈥�

Cooking changes the game dramatically. For one thing, it helps break food down so that we expend less energy chewing and digesting it. Cooking also allows us to absorb more energy from food by denaturing protein and breaking down indigestible carbohydrates such as cellulose into more digestible pieces.

Wrangham builds a compelling case, although archaeological proof of his theory has yet to be found. There is evidence, however, that H. erectus may have conquered fire: the oldest known hearths date from about 800,000 years ago, discovered in Israel on the banks of an ancient lake in the Jordan valley, about 600,000 years before modern Homo sapiens emerged.

These fascinating books show how the biological evolution of human beings may not have been a matter of biology alone, and why, as Wrangham writes, 鈥渨e humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame鈥�.