WI Humans Never Cooked Food, Meat In Particular?

Modern Humans emerged roughly 200,000 years ago. Use of fire dates back at least 400,000 years and possibly as far back as 1,700,000.

Removing fire from the hominid tool kit would probably butterfly away humans as we know them. You'd probably see somewhat different hominids emerging from Homo Erectus, or possibly a longer survival of homo erectus.

You'd see much lower hominid population densities, smaller hominid groups, over a much more restricted area. They'd probably not cope well with northern regions. But they'd also face serious competition from more conventional apes in the tropics. They'd likely be much more vulnerable to predators, shorter life spans, more health issues.

Just about every facet of human culture would be seriously butterflied. Humans as we know them would not exist. The alternate homo that did exist would almost certainly be tool users of some sort, but the tool use would probably be less significant. Better than chimps, better than otters, at least as good as erectus, not so well as sapiens.
 
There's significant difference between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens.

Granted. There are also significant differences between American football and Canadian football. But, those differences don't seem quite as significant when you compare both of them to rugby league, rugby union, Gaelic football and association football.

I don't believe Homo erectus had the brain power to construct complex societies. We'd still be stuck using the same simple tools for millions of years and following set behavior patterns.

But, the archaeological record demonstrates that Homo erectus innovated and improved their own tool designs over time. What makes you think they couldn't keep progressing?
 
The thing most people are forgetting is, if we (humanity) had been fireless for our entire evolution we would be adapted to consuming foods that dont need cooking.

I'm skeptical: I think the timeframe is too short for evolution to be a major player.

We have to assume that the original state of human physiology was adapted to consuming uncooked food, since our evolutionary lineage had been eating uncooked food for as long as it existed before that. So, we should assume that we didn't require any new adaptations for digesting raw food.

But, if we could cook, this would reduce the selection for people who can digest raw food. But, it didn't necessarily select for people who couldn't digest raw food, so the evolutionary changes involved here would be slow and inconsistent.

I think we can go ahead and assume that our digestive systems wouldn't differ that much.
 
I think, for the most part, we don't disagree on much: you seem to be describing pretty much the same scenario I expect, but with a more pessimistic outlook on it than I have.
True. I am not a very optimistic person.

I'm not sure what you mean by "for long term," but they certainly are edible raw.
Besides the fact that peanuts, like many other legumes, contain lectins which cause red blood cells to clump together, they are also commonly infected by Aspergillus flavus which produces aflatoxin, one of the most potent liver carcinogens known. Cooking, especially roasting, destroys lectins and reduces the amount of aflatoxin to safer levels, though it does not eliminate the potential for carcinogenicity due to the tiny amounts of aflatoxin needed to cause cancer. Eating raw peanuts is a good way to expose yourself to high levels of aflatoxin, especially in the peanuts were stored in warm, humid environments.


I've never heard this before. As near as I can ascertain, it's not true. There is a plant called the "wild pea" which is toxic, but it's a different species and genus from the domesticated pea (Pisum sativum).
Just going off what I know about the closest relatives to Pisum: Lathyrus and Vicia are definitely toxic even cooked. Also, an Indian study showed that even domestic varieties of Pisum sativum showed trypsin inhibition and hemagglutinin activity, both of which are deactivated by cooking. Domesticated peas also contain moderate amounts of cyanogenic glycosides which, if the glycoside levels in cultivated versus wild cassava and almonds are any indication, would have been much higher in the wild precursor species.


Long enough for what?
Long enough to be ensure a consitant food supply in times of need. Greens are very rarely available year-round. The supply depends on rainfall and the seasons.


Granted. However, not everything needs to be a staple food source, and there still are a good number of greens that can be eaten raw.
Greens provide little besides vitamins and fiber. Humans need large amounts of carbohydrates and proteins. The only greens that contain large amounts of protein, stinging nettle for example, require cooking to deactivate toxins.

Granted. But, humans still spent the majority of our evolutionary history living in the tropics and eating uncooked food, and we even spread across the entire Old World before we learned how to cook our food. Some of us even lived in Europe a million years ago, when it was in a glacial period, apparently without the use of fire. All these things about disease and nutrition and population numbers are good and valid points, but, given what the anthropological record suggests about pre-fire humans, I think it entirely too credulous to think humans won't find a way around this obstacle.
AFAIK, anatomically modern humans always had the benefit of fire to render food edible. Look at what hunter-gathers/slash-and-burn cultures living in the tropics eat as their main source of carbs: cassava, sago, cycad seeds, yams, millet, taro, pejibaye, etc, all of which need processing of some kind followed by cooking to become edible.

Human societies would still exist, but they would consist of small groups of people very thinly spread over vast amounts of territory.
 
The thing most people are forgetting is, if we (humanity) had been fireless for our entire evolution we would be adapted to consuming foods that dont need cooking. (Plus, there are a few tribes in the world that lost the ability to use fire sometime in the past and they still survived).
What Sven said. Also, other than fruit, there is no part of a plant that is designed to be eaten by us. Not having access to cooking means that pretty much every meal would be equivalent to eating the contents of a pharmacy. Grazers can get around the toxins by having a rumen and/or a huge cecum populated by the necessary gut flora to break them down and by being very picky with their food. We got around the problem by inventing methods to detoxify food sources, most of which require fire.
 
True. I am not a very optimistic person.

Meh. You don't sound like a pessimist to me: just a skeptic.

Aside from some details about specific crops, we pretty much agree on everything here. Fire is an important development on humanity's route to advanced civilization. If humans never learned to cook food, I bet we would still have eventually refined stone industry to the highest degree attained in OTL, but without corresponding developments in agriculture, architecture or husbandry.
 
Meh. You don't sound like a pessimist to me: just a skeptic.

Aside from some details about specific crops, we pretty much agree on everything here. Fire is an important development on humanity's route to advanced civilization. If humans never learned to cook food, I bet we would still have eventually refined stone industry to the highest degree attained in OTL, but without corresponding developments in agriculture, architecture or husbandry.

Not quite. A lot of neolithic stone working involved use of fire.

And a much thinner population would probably have less access to resources. Good flints are not necessarily universally found. So tool use might be much more improvisational.

Generally, I would expect less innovation in this scenario, simply because a smaller population overall contains fewer innovating individuals.
 
What if humans for whatever reason never cooked meat or food in general, but stuck to eating berries,seed, nuts, pulses and raw meat?
I have heard it said that our digestive systems much more closely resemble herbivores rather than omnivores or carnavores!
The only reason humans exist in the first place is that several million years ago some H. habilis learned to cook food and thus were able to evolve into H. erectus. Cooking our food means we can devote less body-mass to our guts, meaning we can devote more energy to our brains, and even so we were only able to scrounge up enough energy to "pay for" our big brains by becoming predators and having previously learned to walk upright.
 
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