“Conservatives of this temperament love nothing more than a story about how some well- meaning attempt to improve the human conditions backfired (through the “law of unintended consequences”) leaving the supposed beneficiaries much worse off than they were before (and egg on the face of the chastened liberals, who with their insufferable combination of moral superiority and intellectual hubris thought that they could improve the human condition).”

A meal at Fäviken Magasinet

“Early homo, (not H. ergaster/erectus, but habilis) has long been seen by many palaeanthropologists as another form of australopith, and the relative brain size distributions of early Homo and Australopiths overlap and are not very different. The big shift is with erectus/ergaster, and some of us have argued this is related to technology, but not the origin of stone tools; rather, the first controlled use of fire, cooking, and shortly thereafter, stone tools that are made and curated for longer term use.”

“After adjusting for body mass, they calculated how many hours per day it would take for various primates to eat enough calories of raw food to fuel their brains. They found that it would take 8.8 hours for gorillas; 7.8 hours for orangutans; 7.3 hours for chimps; and 9.3 hours for our species, H. sapiens.”

“But the real revolution came once human ancestors tasted a tuber baked in a lightning-sparked grass fire and realized the value of cooking, Wrangham asserts. Heat turns hard-to-digest carbohydrates into sweet, easy-to-absorb calories. Using the protein, fat, and carbohydrate makeup of modern fruits, seeds, meats, and tubers, Wrangham’s team calculated the caloric value of diets containing various proportions of these foods, assuming a constant total amount of food dry matter. A diet of 60% cooked tubers, about the proportion used in modern native African diets, and no meat boosts caloric intake by about 43% over that of humans who ate nuts, berries, and raw tubers, says Wrangham. A 60% meat diet offers just a 20% advantage.”