What the cavemen taught us.
August 15th 2008 06:27
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After two tremendous growth spurts — one in size, followed by an even more important one in cognitive ability — the human brain is now a lot like a teenage boy.
It consumes huge amounts of calories, is rather temperamental and, when harnessed just right, exhibits incredible prowess.
The brain's roaring metabolism, possibly stimulated by early man's invention of cooking, may be the main factor behind our most critical cognitive leap, new research suggests.
About 2 million years ago, the human brain rapidly increased its mass until it was double the size of other primate brains.
"This happened because we started to eat better food, like eating more meat," said researcher Philipp Khaitovich of the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai.
But the increase in size, Khaitovich continued, "did not make humans as smart as they are today."
The early shift
For a long time, we were pretty dumb.
Humans did little but make "the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years," Khaitovich said.
Then, only about 150,000 years ago, a different type of spurt happened — our big brains suddenly got smart.
We started innovating. We tried different materials, such as bone, and invented many new tools, including needles for beadwork. Responding to, presumably, our first abstract thoughts, we started creating art and maybe even religion.
To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, Khaitovich and colleagues examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years.
Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism.
The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, said Khaitovich, carefully adding that definitive claims of causation are premature.
Taken from Foxnews.com
Sounds good to me, but how come we are now eating TOO MUCH?
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