For how long have we been cooking?

I have a problematic relationship with cooking. This is a source of shame for me on two levels. One is personal as my mother is a very good cook. Years after the incident, she still tells the story to her friends — that I once catapulted a piece of “gabi” (taro) causing it to stick to the ceiling (for a long while) after I tried to mash it from the sinigang broth I was trying to cook. On another level, the control of fire, perfected in the art and science of cooking is also one of the defining traits of being human. If there were genes for cooking, I am probably a good specimen to prove that modern humans might have interbred with other species who just sucked at cooking. But until science finds that there are indeed genes responsible for cooking, I remain simply and hopelessly terrible in the kitchen through my own doing or undoing.

About two years ago, I have written a column about a book entitled “How Cooking Made Us Human (2009) by Richard Wrangham. He still continues to do research on the topic. I found his name as part of a team of scientists with Charles L. Nunn and Zarin Machanda led by Chris Organ in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US last Aug 21. The study is entitled “Phylogenetic rate shifts in feeding time during the evolution of Homo.”

“Phylogenetics” refers to the study of how organisms are related throughout long periods of time. Thus, their study is about how the feeding time of the human species changed across very long periods of time (millions of years.)

We have always assumed that modern humans (Homo sapiens), the species to which all humans who are living now all belong, were the ones who discovered “food processing,” which included cooking. They learned how to take what they hunted and gathered to transform with fire. As a result, they started to easily chew food and spent less time chewing. Their bodies were also able to break down the cooked food more readily. That would explain why we have smaller teeth, particularly molars and also smaller guts than other primates. Many scientists, including the researchers of this published research, also think that cooking also made us smarter. This is because the energy previously devoted by the body to break down raw plants and animals eaten by then hungry humans, became free to devote itself to other things to help humans adapt even more successfully. But did cooking really all just start with modern humans or does it go farther back with older human species?

The scientists found that the amount of time that two other kinds of humans, Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis, spent feeding was closer to that spent by Homo sapiens than to chimpanzees, our closest genetic cousins. These two human species also had molar size closer to that of modern humans. Homo sapiens spend about 4.7 percent while H erectus and H neanderthalensis spent about 6.1 to 7 percent while chimps spent about 47 percent time of their lives eating and had the teeth size (larger than humans’) to show for it. They thus raised the possibility that cooking might have really started about 1.9 million years ago with H erectus.

Now, before you start imagining Homo erectus doing soufflés, you might want to know that the problem with this finding is that scientists have not found remains of cookware from that long ago. In this kind of research, a convergence of evidence from the various fields of science always helps establish it with a higher level of certainty. Till then, the theory that cooking started with Homo erectus 1.9 million years ago will, so to speak, only hang by their molars and the time they spent chewing.

Even if I gloriously suck at cooking or probably because I do, my heroes and heroines include people who are so good in the kitchen. Aside from my own mom, one of them is my friend Dette who just makes any dish a celebration for the soul and the senses. These people seemed to have homed that skill passed on through time and made the best of that grilling, sizzling, steaming, stewing strategy our human ancestors discovered. Thanks to people like them, there will be more good food and less circus taro acts in the kitchen.

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