It all Began with Cooking – Cristoph Lundgreen

What do all human beings have in common, regardless of their culture or cuisine? And how does this distinguish ‘us’ from all other creatures, from great apes to mythical cyclopes?

Illustration: ©Kristin Meyer, Translation: Diana Aurisch The most radical revolution in human history took place in prehistoric times, nearly two million years ago. To find out more, we need to look deeply into human DNA and far back into the past to ‘our’ beginnings. ‘We’ looked decidedly different from humans today, only slowly began to walk upright and sleep on the ground, forgot how to climb, lost ever more fur, and in the course of an evolution that took many hundreds of thousands of years, turned into those ‘hunters and gatherers’ of 30,000 years ago, who left behind impressive cave paintings and art objects. How did all of that happen? British primate researcher and professor for biological anthropology Richard Wrangham has a simple answer: cooking made us human! Obviously, many people find cooked food to be delicious. The important element of his theory, however, is that it is much easier for our bodies to absorb nutrients from cooked food. Thus the term ’cooked’ refers to the purely technical molecular transformation of food, such as the liquefaction of fat, the enzymatic unlocking of cells or the denaturation of protein. When it comes to meat, for example, this can be achieved in several ways: via heat, by roasting or baking; via acid, by marinating with a delicious sauce; or even via plain violence  – think, for example, of carpaccio. But how can this aspect of cooking plausibly be shown to be a prerequisite for the development of Homo sapiens? Wrangham’s model is based on different factors, starting with the increasing brain size of ‘our ancestor’ Homo erectus. Scientists have been able to reconstruct this development with the aid of skeleton finds. If we take into account that nowadays our brain uses 20 per cent of the acquired energy despite the fact that it only makes up two per cent of our body weight, it becomes clear that the body needed to reduce the energy required in other areas. The size of many organs, such as the heart, has to remain in proportion to our body size, which leads to the theory that, over time, the stomach decreased in size – while adapting to more highly processed and thus more energy-rich food – to ensure the necessary ‘energy savings’ required by the ever larger brain. On the one hand, this fits well together with other structures of our anatomy, such as the jaw, mouth, lips, and teeth, which are all obviously smaller than those of the great apes. On the other hand, the necessity, or rather the evolutionary advantage, of a larger brain for communication is evident – starting with the development of language, which was both required and advanced by group activities, such as hunting for wild animals or sitting around a campfire together.

Prometheus - the forefather of cooking

Independently of this evolutionary model, archaeologists have identified fireplaces that can be dated to a million years ago, which underscores the fact that the use of fire for cooking was mastered long before the appearance of Homo sapiens around 200,000 B.C. Indeed, my own discipline, ancient history, has been able to recognise traces of this prehistory in Greek mythology. The first example is Prometheus, who brings fire to humans not once but also a second time, after Zeus had taken it away from them. This seems to imply that the discovery of fire is imagined as having occurred prior to the start of civilisation, and Prometheus, to whom the Roman poet Ovid later even ascribed the creation of humans, could in fact be regarded as the forefather of cooking. After all, he is the one who deceives Zeus during a meal and manages to allocate the animal sacrifices in such a way that the bones and skin are given to the gods, while the cooked meat is left for the humans. The universal enjoyment of cooked food can also be found in the ninth song of the Odyssey, in the famous scene between Odysseus and the cyclops Polyphemus. On their journey home after ten years of fighting in the Trojan War, Odysseus and his companions break into the cyclops’ cave and consume his supplies. When this rather rough fellow returns and discovers the thieves, he blocks the cave entrance with a large boulder and begins to eat two of Odysseus’ companions every day, until the men finally manage to blind him and then, hiding underneath the bellies of sheep, escape.

Cooking is universally human

Why is this story relevant here? In Homer, cyclopes generally function as antitheses to the Greeks. They do not convene assemblies, follow no rules or laws, live alone and do not engage in agriculture nor seafaring. They are thus fundamentally different from the Greeks. And while there is a fire in the cave, which Odysseus uses to sharpen the stick for blinding Polyphemus, cyclopes do not cook. Polyphemus’ devouring of Odysseus’ companions is therefore a double breach of civilised mores and a twofold display of cultural difference: on the one hand, he refuses hospitality to them; on the other hand, he devours them raw. Interestingly, however, nothing further is said about this by the poet – most likely because eating something raw is so obviously strange and foreign; cooking is not just typically Greek, but universally human. This remains true to this day. The studies led by Wrangham show that individuals living under modern world conditions, with heated rooms and public transport, could subsist exclusively on raw food and could even feel well doing so. However, the participants in the experiments lost so much weight that some of them would have been unable to have children for the duration of the study. This result suggests that, from the perspective of evolution, a return to raw food is no longer possible. The invention of cooking thus qualifies as an irreversible revolution. Christoph Lundgreen joined the Junge Akademie in 2016. He conducts research and teaches in the Department of History at the Technische Universität Dresden.

Select Annotated Bibliography: The theory of (r)evolution via fire and especially cooking follows to a great extent the work of primate researcher Richard Wrangham and his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (London 2009). Similar ideas, though lacking comparable nourishment-physiological arguments, can already be found in Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s famous work Physiologie du goût (Paris 1825), which contains the following saying, well suited to the current context: ‘Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.’ Regarding the aspect of socialisation around the communal fire, see Robin Dunbar, The Social Brain Hypothesis (Evolutionary Anthropology 6, 1998, 178-190), or Martin Jones, Feast: Why Humans Share Food (Oxford 2007). A compact overview of the physical and chemical behaviour of molecules during cooking is provided by Hervé This-Benckhard in his book Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking (New York 2007). The standard work on the scientific principles of cooking remains Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (New York 2004). Further culinary (and cultural / historical) observations on the topic of ‘cooking with fire’ can be found in the excellent book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan (which contains a comprehensive bibliography, including on ‘cooking and gender’, among other topics). Those interested in prehistory are advised to turn to Hermann Parzinger, Die Kinder des Prometheus: Eine Geschichte der Menschheit vor der Erfindung der Schrift (Munich 2015); regarding archaeological evidence of fireplaces, see F. Berna et al., Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, No. 20, 2012; available online under: doi: 10.1073/pnas.1117620109). The developments described in this contribution have also been referred to in recent studies that cover the history of humankind from a global perspective and from the very beginning up to the present, like Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind (London 2014) or Ian Morris, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve (Princeton 2015), who discusses the biological development of values and their dependence on the amount of energy available to humans. A humorous portrayal of the ‘invention’ of fire is presented in the novel The Evolution Man – Or, How I Ate My Father by Roy Lewis (New York 1960). The most important sources for the Prometheus myth are Hesiod’s ‘The Theogeny’ (vv. 507-616) and ‘Works and Days’ (vv. 45-105) as well as Aischylos’s ‘Prometheus Bound’ and Plato’s ‘Protagoras’ (320d-322a); the creation of mankind can be found in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ (1, 76-89). The scene in which Odysseus’ companions are devoured raw by the cyclops Polyphemus stems from the ninth song of ‘The Odyssey’ by Homer, cf. Charles Segal, The Raw and the Cooked in Greek Literature: Structures, Values, Metaphor (The Classical Journal 69, 1974, 289-308), who bases his argument on Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques I. Le cru et le cuit (Paris 1964). To conclude, one can refer to the often-cited journal entry of the Scottish traveller and author James Boswell, from 15 August 1773 (The Journals, 1762-95): ‘My definition of man is a cooking animal. The beasts have memory, judgement, and the faculties and passions of our minds in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook.’