New research suggests early human ancestors may have been able to cook before controlled fires
, roughly 2m years ago, early human ancestors evolved large brains and began fashioning relatively advanced stone tools, is one of the great mysteries of evolution. Some researchers argue these changes were brought about by the invention of cooking. They point out that our bite weakened around the same time as our larger brains evolved, and that it takes less energy to extract nutrients from cooked food.
Roger Summons of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a solution. Together with his team of geomicrobiologists, he analysed 1.7m-year-old sandstones that formed in an ancient river at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The region is famous for the large number of human fossils that have been discovered there, alongside an impressive assembly of stone tools.
Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard University who devised the cooking hypothesis, is intrigued by the idea. Nonetheless, fire would have offered a distinct advantage to humans, once they had mastered the art of controlling it since, unlike a hot spring, it is a portable resource.section of the print edition under the headline
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