This is really interesting! Like the cooking hypothesis, this feels like another case in which an "externalization" of a digestive or metabolic process is argued to have benefitted human development and specifically increases in brain size.
Thanks for the excellent overview of this fascinating topic, Scott! Claude Lévi-Strauss's _The Raw and the Cooked_ might also shed light. He talks about how the phenomena of raw and cooked would have had an impact on symbolic categories and form in human thinking, including mythical narrative. It would be interesting to see if and how the material and symbolic line up in his study of Native American myth with these new insights and hypotheses.
Thanks! That Lévi-Strauss book is also on my list of cuisine/cooking-related books to get to, so I might end up writing a review of that at some point too. It's also referenced a fair bit in Wrangham's book.
A compelling alternate take is that fermentation, not fire, was the initial step: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05517-3
Fermentation has an additional benefit which would have been immediately beneficial to past populations: cacheing food for later adds its own benefits. Boone and Kessler 1999 identify this as being the potential explanation for higher overall population growth rates for agricultural vs. foraging life ways: https://www.academia.edu/1054537/James_L_Boone_and_Karen_Kessler_More_Status_or_More_Children_Social_Status_Fertility_Reduction_and_Long_term_Fitness_Evolution_and_Human_Behavior_20_257_277_1999
This is really interesting! Like the cooking hypothesis, this feels like another case in which an "externalization" of a digestive or metabolic process is argued to have benefitted human development and specifically increases in brain size.
Thanks for the excellent overview of this fascinating topic, Scott! Claude Lévi-Strauss's _The Raw and the Cooked_ might also shed light. He talks about how the phenomena of raw and cooked would have had an impact on symbolic categories and form in human thinking, including mythical narrative. It would be interesting to see if and how the material and symbolic line up in his study of Native American myth with these new insights and hypotheses.
Thanks! That Lévi-Strauss book is also on my list of cuisine/cooking-related books to get to, so I might end up writing a review of that at some point too. It's also referenced a fair bit in Wrangham's book.