Fred Solomon Vindicated At Last

"We found fire a couple of million years ago, and I think we should use it." --Fred Solomon on Check, Please

Wired:

We cook almost everything, except some fruits and vegetables, and we need to. People on raw-food diets lose weight almost without fail, because they can't access enough calories. Half of all women eating exclusively raw foods become so thin that they stop menstruating, he said.

We saw the "Lucy" (australopithecus) exhibit at the Houston science museum last year, and I commented to a docent about the body shape of the models the pre-homo species versus the homo habilis, erectus and other later ones: like chimpanzees and gorillas, Lucy has sort of a pyramidal chest: narrow a the top, wide at the bottom. This permits sort of a large pot belly. Why? They need a large amount of food input in order to have sort of a "fermentation tank" of a belly, in order to digest enough nutrients from raw plant life.

Later species have fire, and denature a lot of the food externally making the nutrients more accessible. We succeeded because we could make better use of our food when cooked, allowing for bigger brains, longer ranges, etc.