Today we know sugar was a key ingredient for brain development in humans, not just proteins because of eating meat.
If you’re constantly moving sugar is a necessity for maintaining glycogen. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any food type, it’s all about context.
There’s many theories but one that I learned was that women and children provides the bulk of the calories for Early Humans. While the men went out and hunted for meat they also relied on the fruit harvested by the women and children. That would give them the energy necessary for trekking and hunting.
> fruit harvested<p>Also tubers.
So we’re expected to believe each man is carry a basket of rapidly deteriorating fruit (and tubers).<p>Or a knapsack of dried fatty meat with a fairly indefinite shelf life.
The Inca had a method of drying potatoes such that they were stable for multiple years.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu%C3%B1o" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu%C3%B1o</a>
Fruit doesn't go bad in a day.
Maybe they took dried fruit
I don't think this is new. The idea always was that proto-humans had to live in an environment rich with energy dense food (fruit) prior to growing a brain large enough to figure out how to make barbeque. Otherwise you never get to the barbeque capable brain. The whole point of making fire and therefore consuming cooked meat is that now you can migrate to places that don't have abundant sources of energy dense food.
My interpretation was similar. The carb-sugar diet was never a highlight because it was a given. The article talks about primates that have high carb-sugar diets but doesn't explain why their brains remain so small compared to humans. Maybe they will eventually evolve? Maybe cooked meat / dense protein is the X factor? If so, that takes back to the beginning and highlights protein. It seems reasonable the combination of the two would be important. Protein enables muscle development, human evolution made us exceptionally well-suited for long-distance and endurance travel compared to all other living primates. This further improves are ability to forage and is just an evolutionary winning combination.<p>My curiosity leads me more towards, are their other primates that had similar / convergent evolution that independently discovered dense protein sources? Is homo sapien really just a path of singular linear "march of progress" evolution? Were there other marches of progress from other primates or any other species that we competed against or merged with? Those kind of questions become more interesting once you realize the diet combination that creates big brains
Why is it assumed that learning to cooking animals is a necessary hurdle?<p>When we’re capable of eating animals raw. And bugs and worms etc.<p>Whereas in order to consume a wider variety of plants, cooking and other more complex perpetrations are absolutely necessary.
Have to consider meat digestion from a net calorie perspective. Eating raw meat is possible sure. But once you get to dense protein meats like a red meat, your body expends a lot of calories in the act of digesting it raw. Cooking it is like a pre-digestion step and allows your body to digest it with less energy expenditure.<p>It also probably was helpful for other reasons. You could store cooked meat easier/longer without refrigeration or kill off some of the bacteria and such making it healthier.
If you're quite finished parroting RFK Jr pro-parasitic brain worm talking points not even aboriginal Australians ate their fish and meat raw.<p>* <a href="https://warndu.com/blogs/blog/traditional-aboriginal-food" rel="nofollow">https://warndu.com/blogs/blog/traditional-aboriginal-food</a>
Cooking also increases the energy available from plant matter, particularly starchy tubers.
What a coincidence, so do I
Sugar is life. Saccharides FTW!!! vrooooooooooooooooomm