Lecture 1: Hunting, Gathering, and Stone Age Cooking
knuckles on the ground couldn’t compete and, therefore, died off.
Meanwhile, apes stayed in forests. The fi rst cultural changes related to food appeared about 2.5 to
1.5 million years ago with Homo habilis, or “handy man.” He was
found with tools around him, such as fl aked stones for cutting.
Homo habilis had a bigger brain, and the Broca’s area of the brain
was larger, so he probably could speak a bit, too. Homo habilis probably made the transition from a diet comprised
primarily of unprocessed plant foods to a greater amount of meat in
the Pleistocene era, about 1.5 million years ago. Meat was acquired
just as often by scavenging
as hunting. Homo erectus lived from 1.
million to 300,000 years ago
and is found outside Africa and
in Europe. Homo erectus were
probably better walkers than
we are; our pelvises are much
wider to allow for the birth of
infants with big brains. About
700,000 years ago, there’s
direct evidence of hunting.
Most importantly, Homo
erectus probably used fi re. Recently, Richard Wrangham
has made the argument that
Homo erectus also cooked food,
and this made available many
more nutrients, which allowed us to spend less energy digesting
raw food and more energy developing greater brain capacity. In
other words, we evolved because we cooked food.Homo erectus is perhaps an
ancestor of modern humans.© Dorling Kindersley RF/Thinkstock.