Putrefied meat with maggots is all very well if you ignore the bacteria that builds up in the decay. These bacteria cause mild to severe gut distress and food avoidances in primates as well as other animals with long guts adapted to diets of fruit, leaves, flowers, small live prey, and insects. Cooking makes scavenging a possible dietary source of protein which kills bacteria --leaving meat with and without maggots edible. Some of this is I discussed in a paper on scavenging and hunting and again in Diet and Food Preparation: Rethinking Early Hominid Behavior. SONIA RAGIR, 2000 Anthropology Today online). The high protein diet of Neanderthal may have only been possible with cooking--for which there is ample evidence among archaic homo and especially Neanderthals. The other high protein food made available to homo with food preparation such as grating, pounding, soaking & fermentation--and incidentally cooking are underground root stocks which are relatively indigestible without some preparation. The early dietary transition that included underground root stocks may have triggered an initial shift in body/brain development.
Thanks for sharing this perspective! Cooking was definitely important as a way of extending the useful life of animal and plant foods, and opening up foods that would be inedible or less nutritious without cooking. However it is also true that traditional peoples eat uncooked fermented, putrifying, and otherwise aging foods including carcasses. The bacteria (and other microbial forms) involved are not only manageable by these people but are actively sought in many cases.
That is not to say that such foods would have had no costs or consequences for ancient people. The immune involvement in the gut provides people the possibility of adapting to a broad range of bacteria that may have had pathogenic effects in young people the first time or two they ate such foods, enabling them to coexist with these bacteria throughout the rest of their lives.
Food preparation would also include shifts in social organization--preparation includes a delay between foraging and eating--collecting bystanders to share the proceeds of the days root, nuts, berries and greens prepared by, perhaps mostly female, foragers--similar to the redistribution of the less reliable days hunt.
Putrefied meat with maggots is all very well if you ignore the bacteria that builds up in the decay. These bacteria cause mild to severe gut distress and food avoidances in primates as well as other animals with long guts adapted to diets of fruit, leaves, flowers, small live prey, and insects. Cooking makes scavenging a possible dietary source of protein which kills bacteria --leaving meat with and without maggots edible. Some of this is I discussed in a paper on scavenging and hunting and again in Diet and Food Preparation: Rethinking Early Hominid Behavior. SONIA RAGIR, 2000 Anthropology Today online). The high protein diet of Neanderthal may have only been possible with cooking--for which there is ample evidence among archaic homo and especially Neanderthals. The other high protein food made available to homo with food preparation such as grating, pounding, soaking & fermentation--and incidentally cooking are underground root stocks which are relatively indigestible without some preparation. The early dietary transition that included underground root stocks may have triggered an initial shift in body/brain development.
Thanks for sharing this perspective! Cooking was definitely important as a way of extending the useful life of animal and plant foods, and opening up foods that would be inedible or less nutritious without cooking. However it is also true that traditional peoples eat uncooked fermented, putrifying, and otherwise aging foods including carcasses. The bacteria (and other microbial forms) involved are not only manageable by these people but are actively sought in many cases.
That is not to say that such foods would have had no costs or consequences for ancient people. The immune involvement in the gut provides people the possibility of adapting to a broad range of bacteria that may have had pathogenic effects in young people the first time or two they ate such foods, enabling them to coexist with these bacteria throughout the rest of their lives.
Food preparation would also include shifts in social organization--preparation includes a delay between foraging and eating--collecting bystanders to share the proceeds of the days root, nuts, berries and greens prepared by, perhaps mostly female, foragers--similar to the redistribution of the less reliable days hunt.
This is just the type of open minded thought we need!!
Open minded, definitely. Open palate: well, maybe not quite ready for that!