Interesting blarticle!

http://www.mattmetzgar.com/matt_met...ooked-food.html

Apes are not stupid. More calories for less effort. There is also a new paper floating about on tool-using, tuber-digging chimps.

More calories for less effort made sense for millions of years. But these days McDonalds gives you way more calories for hardly any effort. And look what that has done for the average person! Apes are like people - their preferences will betray them when unhealthy foods are readily available.

I followed the link to the article but could only read an abstract. Couldn't find the full text. It did say they are using captive apes. Once researchers start shoving cooked food at captive apes they have introduced all kinds of hard to control variables. Have the apes ever had cooked food before? Are the apes conditioned to eat what their handlers give them? Do the food choices include the foods they ate in the wild or are they only foods they have seen in captivity?

If somebody were to sneak into the apes' native jungle and secretly stash some cooked food next to the apes' natural food and then watch and see which they preferred in their native environment it might be somewhat meaningful. But that would be a lot of work.

Apes prefer cooked foods, and so do we. I think our tastebuds are trying to tell us something, LOL.

Dunno, that carpaccio I've been having lately tastes darn good!

My hamster loves cooked brown rice too- but since I know that in the wild, hamsters would only be eating raw stuff, I keep it to an occasional treat- maybe 3-4 grains of cooked rice once a week. He gets raw grains and seeds daily.

Grains are good for him. He's a hamster. A low carb, high fat diet is NOT a good choice for hamsters! I, however, am a human being, and I prefer to eat like one.

At least the anthros know how little evidence exists for Early Chef. The lay paleos really, really, really love the whole idea of cooking man. Since evidence is spare--spare enough not to make a difference--we might instead ponder why so many people are in love with the hope that cooking is older than we have any evidence for.

Now the blogger descends into magical thinking, as if the gods planned for people to eventually figure out cooking, and endowed them with a taste for boiled, baked and barbequed cuisine, so we could REALLY get into it once we did. And hey, now we find that once apes get smart enough to cook, they will love cooked food, too!

To what else are we predisposed? If we use the logic above, it follows that anything we do a lot of is predisposed. Now, I hope this knocks a big enough hole in the magical thinking for everyone here to start some more real thinking, but if not: IS anything we do a lot of, recently, predisposed?

What about smoking? Alcohol? Drugs? Television? Did we have a predisposition for television? We PREFER television, obviously. We PREFER to work eight hours a day. We PREFER to breathe polluted air. We PREFER to pour cement everywhere. We PREFER to destroy other species to our detriment. Do I sound dumb enough yet? Good.

I don't have time at the moment to pull the Wrangham study in question again (we've discussed this one before), but I remember my first question was: What were the test subjects eating before the study? Cooked food?

Wrangham has made and broken his career on anthropomorphizing. Anyone can speculate as well as he, but most of us don't have the disability of his obsolete training. He needs to spend less time ignoring current theory and more time disproving it. Hell, he needs to spend more time trying to disprove his OWN theory, but I understand that it is hard to disprove something for which there is no evidence.

The Early Chef makes evolutionary sense and is one of the hottest topics on the anthro lists right now. I have a lot of respect for Wrangham and his team at Harvard. Not exactly little-league brains.

Evidence of 1.5 million year old fire pits has been found (not published yet) and there is also the mole evidence.

Yeah, the quality of the debate reminds me of aquatic ape and group selection debates. Or, ahem, demonic males debate.

If the same experiment was done with my dogs then you'd get the same result. Proves squat.

Does your dog prefer cooked human food to cooked dog food?

I find this piece of evidence more intriguing:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...imps-tools.html

My dogs prefer cooked (hard boiled) eggs to raw eggs. They greatly prefer the yolk to the white.

From the National Geographic article
That shows that fiber should not be eaten, just chewed and spit out like gum!

With your dog, I agree, it probably proves nothing. Most dogs were raised on cooked food and animals tend to prefer familiar foods. The interesting thing here is that these apes were not raised on cooked food.

Here's a Discovery article that goes into more detail that the first thing I posted: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/...-ape-taste.html

I think they would have enjoyed the tubers more if they were cooked.

Hunters and gatherers who eat a lot of fiber are healthy. Why should we not eat fiber?

I think the only reason for the anti-fiber sentiment is that is conflicts with a 100% protein diet.