Question

According to Suzana Herculano Houzel, what does cooking have to do with human evolution? (7pts). Considering their raw diets, why can’t great apes “afford” brains with more neurons? (4 pts).

Answer 1

According to Suzana, cooking has been one of the major contributing factors towards why, humans - who have evolved from primates - have been the ones who have been able to retain, so to speak, larger brains as compared to other primates who are larger in size but have relatively smaller brains (as it is suggested that human brain size is large for the human body - in terms of proportions). She attributes this to the calory intake and suggests that humans have been able to get sufficient calory to sustain both a big body and brain as they have been able to save time on eating and processing raw food - which takes time, which means delayed calory processing. If we didn't learn how to cook with the application of heat, which makes the process easier, we'd spend most of our time gathering food and processing less of it, which would as per evolution go to sustain a bigger body.

This is also the reason why a great ape cannot have a brain that is similar to a humans in terms of neuronal capacity as they have raw diet, which means that it takes longer to process (that calories), which, when processed, is utilized to sustain a larger body as opposed to brain.