Meera Pema

Professor Hunter

English 2

9 February 2019

Annotated Bibliography

My essay will explore the theory that learning to cook is the factor that made us human.

It will also explain the other factors and theories that may have led to an increase in brain size of

homo erectus​. Considering all the evidence, I will attempt to argue that learning how to cook is

the theory that makes the most sense. Lastly, I will explain that the nature of evidence and time

period at hand causes a lot of uncertainty and lack of agreement on this theory.

Mott, Nicholas. “What Makes us Human? Cooking, Study Says.” ​National Geographic News​, 26

October 2012,

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/10/121026-human-cooking-evolution-raw-food-

health-science/. Accessed on 28 January 2019.

This is an article called “What Makes us Human? Cooking, Study Says” written by

Nicholas Mott from National Geographic News that claims that cooking allowed ​homo erectus ​to

develop a bigger brain, but at a cost. The opportunity cost of learning to cook food was

ultimately choosing brains over brawn. Unlike ape ancestors, ​homo erectus​ was significantly
smaller as they lost a lot of physical mass in exchange for a bigger brain. This is related to the

smaller gut bigger brain theory, which claims that the gut size shrank as a result of the increase

in brain size. The article goes on to discuss whether these changes attribute to evolution or

devolution. Some believe that a raw diet is healthier and more favorable overall, so cooking

was a mistake. The author negates this with facts proving that consumers actually get more

nutrients out of their food when it is cooked, rather than in raw form, thus maximizing food

efficiency.

The writer’s purpose is to analyze human development regarding cooking. Mott does a

good job of assessing all the benefits and disadvantages of learning to cook. The audience of the

piece includes subscribers of the National Geographic News or anyone who wants to learn about

human evolution or the history of our diet. It was published in 2012, based on a study conducted

by two neuroscientists at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at the Federal University of Rio de

Janeiro in Brazil. This is relatively current as research in this field develops pretty slowly.

The author is a writer for National Geographic Magazine. The author is credible because

he works for an accredited science and wildlife organization. It employs teams of scientists and

editors to accurately inform people. The author gained their information from neuroscientists

who conducted a study in Brazil. This source is reliable because National Geographic funds

honest, academic research.

I will use this article to go into detail about the benefits and disadvantages of learning to

cook. My research question answers why cooking makes us human, and this article will help

give details as to the various aspects of humans that are a result of cooking. It also explains how

humanoid species that did not learn to cook compare. This will give me a more well rounded
perspective of the topic. There is also information about raw food arguments that the opposition

uses and why they are wrong.

Standage, Tom, and George K. Wilson. ​An Edible History of Humanity. [Electronic Resource].​

[Old Saybrook, Con.] : Tantor Media, 2009, 2009. ​EBSCOhost​,

sinclair.ohionet.org:80/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&d

b=cat01128a&AN=scc.b1560368&site=eds-live. ​Accessed on 30 January 2019.

“An Edible History of Humanity” by Tom Standage delves into the ways that the

evolution of both humans and food are interconnected. The first chapter looks at food as a

technology. Corn, originally ​teosinte ​was small, hard, and could barely be called edible. As

hunter gatherers intervened, the recessive ​tgai g​ ene in corn that allowed kernels to show on the

outside became common, but otherwise it would have disappeared due to natural selection. The

second chapter focuses on the development of agriculture. It seems that farmers were

significantly less healthy than hunter gatherers, as skeletal remains show evidence of various

diseases. The shift to agriculture does seem logical evolutionarily, but due to a combination of

factors like climate change, it happened before humans could consciously make an effort to go

back to hunting and gathering. Early agriculture relied heavily on the grains mentioned before,
and with time, they evolved in important ways. Corn, a prominent cereal grain, became reliant

on humans to reproduce due to another mutation of the tgi gene.

Tom Standage wrote this book to inform readers about how important food is to the

history of humans. People do not realize how much of an impact humans have made on the

world in different ways that are highlighted in this book, such as the evolution of corn. The

audience of this piece is the general public, but it is more targeted to anthropologists. The book

was written in 2009 which means that the information presented in the book may not include all

the latest information, but very little is known about history about this time period, and new

discoveries regarding it are rare.

This source is Tom Standage, an acclaimed writer who graduated from Oxford

University. He has a very good reputation, editing for the ​Economist​ and writing for the​ New

York Times​, making him credible. Tom has adequate information to write the book through

research and help from resources provided to him by the organizations that he works for. This

book is credible and has been praised by many scholars, including anthropologists.

I will use the first two chapters of this source to assess the opportunity cost of humans

learning to cook. It shows the disadvantages and full impact of learning how to cook. Cooking

and its physical effect on humans caused a lot of disease and malnutrition in agricultural

communities. This will help me look at the topic more objectively, by citing all of the

ramifications that cooking had on the evolution of humans. It helps to explain that even though

cooking may not have been the most beneficial course of action, it still makes us human in more

ways that people first think.

Raeburn, Paul. ​Did Cooking Give Humans An Evolutionary Edge?​ National Public Radio, 2009.

EBSCOhost​,

sinclair.ohionet.org:80/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&d

b=edsggo&AN=edsgcl.206805116&site=eds-live. ​Accessed on 30 January 2019.

Paul Raeburn talks to Wrangham about his new book, “Catching Fire: How Cooking

Made Us Human,” on National Public Radio in 2009. Wrangham argues the theory that cooking

makes us human. It starts by explaining that human prehistory dates back to a time that is hard

to gather information about. There is limited or indirect evidence other than bone structures,

which do show the evolution between humanoid species. As anthropologists tried to piece

together what caused differences in physical structure, they became engrossed with ​homo

erectus,​ whose brain became larger. It seemed like there was something missing, and cooking is

one theory for these changes. Wrangham goes on to explain that the meat eating theory does not

make sense because of difficulty and inefficiency of chewing raw meat, even with modern

chimpanzees. The amount of nutrients that are actually digested has a great impact on

performance, and cooking is simply the most effective.

The purpose of this podcast is to inform and persuade the public about Wrangham’s book

and theory about cooking making us human. His book also helps to give more credibility to this

theory versus other theories that have been proposed. The audience of this piece is the public

and probably other anthropologists and related scientists. This piece was put on the radio and in

podcast form to inform and persuade people to believe this theory, which could cause a bias.
 The people involved are Dr. Wrangham and Paul Raeburn, the host. The author of the

book is credible because he is a famous British primatologist. He has won awards for his

research and writing and graduated from Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He has adequate

information from his own research and expertise on the subject and from others in his field. This

source is reliable because it interviews a professional in the topic and is done through a credible

organization, but it still may have a bias.

I will use this source to cite the meat eating counter argument and negate it. I will also

use it to explain the origins of why this is an anthropological question. I will give a little bit of

context as to where there are discrepancies with evolution and why all the other theories have

been proposed. I will also state why the cooking theory is the most obvious explanation even

though there is little hard evidence.

Did Cooking Make Us Human? [Electronic Resource]​. New York, N.Y. : Films Media Group,

[2010], 2010. ​EBSCOhost,​

sinclair.ohionet.org:80/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat01

128a&AN=scc.b1351578&site=eds-live. ​Accessed on 29 January 2019.

This video is narrated by a few people from BBC that was produced in 2010. It claims

that cooking made us human and follows an experiment that tries to recreate human teeth and

stomach to try to prove it. First, a group of people were asked to eat a raw diet that

australopithecus would have eaten for a few weeks and they lost weight. Then the ancient jaw

expert, Peter Ungar, demonstrates the way that teeth from earlier humans crushed a raw carrot
easily but not raw meat. Later human species however, did crush the meath easily with sharper

teeth. The documentary then goes on to explain that the origins of cooking is debatable. Many

argue that it started with ​homo erectus​ as seen by evidence of tools and animal bones found in

sites in Africa. However, cooking cannot be proven at this site because there are no butcher

marks on any of the animal bones. Another study was done that shows that mice that ate cooked

yams gave them more energy over uncooked yams. A model of a stomach that stimulates

digestion showed that cooked potatoes released a greater amount of sugar into the bloodstream

over uncooked potatoes. Molecularly, vegetables release starch molecules that contain more

energy are released when heated, explaining why more nutrients are released when food is

cooked. The energy needed to undergo the process of digestion is reduced by a quarter when

food is cooked according to a study done with pythons. The theory of smaller gut, bigger brain

was developed by Peter Wheeler. Brain activity consumes 20 percent of our energy, almost

double of the average of all other animal brains. Now, people have trouble controlling their diets

because humans are programed to seek energy rich foods, usually involving sugar.

The audience for this piece is the general public. BBC appears on general television and

people especially interested in this topic can watch videos if they are subscribed to the channel

on their website. This piece was made shortly after the release of Wranham’s theory. It shows

multiple other studies that have been done that support his theory, bringing all the evidence to

support it in one place. The piece was written by a British network in 2010. There may be more

recent studies that would support or negate this theory.

There is no one author, but BBC produced this video. This team is credible because

BBC, the trusted organization that makes scientific documentaries draw upon recent studies and
brings them to the public. They work closely with experts in the related field of the

documentary. For example, there were five different experiments shown in this video that had

been conducted by professionals. It also aims to be objective as it does a well rounded analysis

of the effects of cooking and mentions the weaknesses of the evidence. The theory cannot be

completely proven with anything that has been found so far.

I will use the studies mentioned in this documentary for facts about how the theory has

been tested in the present day. For example, I will talk about how the animals were used to show

just how much cooking can reduce the energy it takes to digest food and give extra calories. I

can also explain the way that cooking molecularly activates foods to give the consumer more

sugar, and thus energy. The scientific process of eating raw versus cooked food is thoroughly

explained by the modern experiments. The speculative evidence comes from bones and the

changes between ​australopithecus, homo habilis, and homo erectus. ​The changes in brain and

gut size are also quantified in these studies, which will be helpful information to use.

Alianda Maira Cornélio, et al. “Human Brain Expansion during Evolution Is Independent of Fire

Control and Cooking.” ​Frontiers in Neuroscience, Vol 10 (2016),​ 2016. ​EBSCOhost​,

doi:10.3389/fnins.2016.00167/full.

https://doaj.org/article/7258e8080f9d44b59b0958e3bd77f45b. ​Accessed on 30 January

2019.
 Alinda and other neuroscientists are the authors of a new study “Human Brain Expansion

during Evolution Is Independent of Fire Control and Cooking.” that appeared in ​Frontiers in

Neuroscience. ​This experiment focused on the calorie differences from consuming raw meat and

cooked meat with mice. They found that it did not make a difference. In the introduction

section, the hypothesis expensive tissue hypothesis is mentioned, which is the idea that a tradeoff

between body and brain size occured. The experiment also showed results supporting the idea

that maintaining a large number of neurons was dependent on foraging efficiency, rather than

cooking meat. The hypothesis that fire control led to brain growth is seen as very unlikely.

Furthermore, the period of large brain growth happens in a period where there is little to no

evidence of fire control. Periods of weak and strong evidence of fire control show fossils with

similar brain volumes. In the discussion section, the experiment is summed up by explaining

that the unproportional increase in brain size compared to body size is unlikely due to energy

intake but rather an increase in foraging efficiency or finding more calories of food with 5-6

hours a day. It does conclude that more direct and indirect evidence needs to be collected to

strengthen any of the theories as there are still many unknown factors.

The writer's purpose in writing this report is to share their experiment with other

scientists to continue to debate the theory of cooking. The audience of this piece include other

neuroscientists as well as scientists involved with anthropology and the theory of cooking. This

piece was written in response to the newly proposed theory that cooking led to brain growth and

evolution. It shows another experiment that supports disproving it. The things that were said in

the discussion section largely respond to negating the claim, but it does do it in an objective

manner, ultimately claiming that more research needs to be done to make it scientific fact.
 The authors are credible because they are professional neuroscientists. The lab report

also references other studies and sources that relate to the topic as well as references for other

professionals that peer edited the study to make it valid. Peer reviewing by others in the same

field is part of the process that ensures that studies published in science journals are valid. The

authors are writing about their own experiment and also discuss other related experiments, so

they do have adequate information and data to use.

This source will be used for my rebuttal. It shows a study that explains the alternate

theory that foraging efficiency led to an increased brain size. The data collected with mice

consuming cooked and uncooked meat in this experiment shows that fire control and cooking are

independent of evolution. Though in the discussion section of the paper, it does say that more

research needs to be done to prove anything. There are various indirect pieces of evidence and

studies that support and negate the theory of cooking being the main factor to an increased brain

size. Due to the nature of the evidence, there is still much discrepancy about why evolution

happened the way that it did. I will use this source to discuss the uncertainty that still remains as

well.

Bradt, Steve. “Invention of Cooking Drove Evolution of the Human Species, New Book

Argues.” ​Harvard Gazette,​ Harvard Gazette, 1 June 2009,

news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/06/invention-of-cooking-drove-evolution-of-the-hu

man-species-new-book-argues/. Accessed on 30 January 2019.

 Steve Bradt published the article “Invention of cooking drove evolution of the human

species, new book argues We are what we eat, and what we cook” on the Harvard Gazette on

June 1, 2009. It discusses the main claim that Wrangham makes in his book “​Catching Fire:

How Cooking Made Us Human​”, which is that cooking is the trait that makes us human. In

other words, cooking is the factor that allowed ​homo erectus ​to branch off from other humanoid

species. The article talks about how learning to cook allowed for ​homo erectus ​to have more

efficiency in their food, allowing them to develop a bigger brain and smaller gut. It also allowed

them to have more time to do other things such as develop social skills, build tools, and develop

agriculture. The article also negates the claim that eating meat was the factor that makes humans

unique, as this marked the divergence from ​australopithecines​ to ​Homo habilis​ and jaw

developments in ​homo erectus ​do not match the effects of meat eating.

The author of this article intended to inform the science and technology scholar

community about the newest book in field of human archaeology. The Harvard Gazette is

Harvard University’s central location where scholars can be informed about new studies. This

means that information posted there is based on new scientific studies and research, meaning it

is credible. However, this is an article written about a book, so it could still have a bias.

Steve Bradt was previously a member of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Science, as a

media specialist. He now works for MIT, and continues to feature science articles in the media.

Prestigious colleges like Harvard and MIT make sure that their writers publish information that

is accurately reflecting the research of their colleges. It was also written in 2009, which is fairly

recent in terms of archeology, in which new discoveries come slowly. For these reasons, this

source is credible.
 I will use this source to generate the points supporting my claim. It nicely outlines the

​ his includes the

reasons why cooking is the factor that led to the divergence of ​homo erectus. T

physical changes including a larger brain, smaller gut, and smaller jaw structure. It also

explains how humans were able to make more time to specialize in other developments like

agriculture and social structures. These will make good topics for paragraphs in my paper. I can

make the claim that none of these factors made us human first, because cooking led to these

other developments.

Adler, Jerry. “Why Fire Makes Us Human.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 1 June

2013, www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes-us-human-72989884/.

Accessed on 30 January 2019.

“Why Fire Makes Us Human.” is an article written by Jerry Adler published on June 1,

2013 for the Smithsonian website. First the article discusses the facts revolving around the

human brain. The brian takes about one fifth of humans’ calorie intake. It explains Carmody’s

experiment that shows that humans eating a raw food diet, even when intaking a normal amount

of calories, do not have enough energy to survive for very long. The article explains the

“expensive tissue hypothesis” and different views of it. This hypothesis is dependent on fire

control. Wrangham emphasizes cooking as the evolutionary edge while Aiello and Wheeler cite

meat eating. Opposition argues that cooking does not make sense because there is little data
proving that fire had been used by the time that ​homo erectus​ ​appeared. Either way, fire was a

crucial prerequisite for either of these views.

The writer’s purpose in writing the article is to argue that fire makes us human. It also

takes into account four different perspectives on the topic, informing readers of each hypothesis.

In all the perspectives described, fire control was necessary. Adler emphasizes the use of fire as

the trait that makes us human.

This article was written by Jerry Adler, who is an author for the Smithsonian Institution.

He has adequate information to draw upon provided by the institution, which is the national

museum organization. The source is reliable because the Smithsonian an accredited national

institution that is an extension of the government. The piece was written a few years ago and

relates to fossils of human structures that are located at the Natural History Museum, which is

very relevant to the topic of cooking and evolution.

I will use this source to highlight the view that fire control is what makes us human.

Though many cite this as the factor that makes us human, this is only part of the story. As the

article explains, other theories suggest that cooking or eating meat is the second part of gaining a

bigger brain. Though it is clear that fire was important, it was not the direct factor that led to an

increase in brain size. The article also verifies facts that were mentioned in my other sources.

This uniformity in information strengthens the evidence.