Monday, August 18, 2008

Cooking Meat Made us Smart

Cooking meat may have made our ancestors smarter
By ANI on Sunday, August 17, 2008
Filed Under: Health News

A new research has suggested that cooking meat may have made our ancestors smarter.

According to a report in Live Science, the research indicates that 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.

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 did not make humans as smart as they are today,” he added.

For a long time, humans did little but make the same very boring stone tools for almost 2 million years, according to Khaitovich.

Then, only about 150,000 years ago, a different type of spurt happened — our big brains suddenly got smart. Read More

We hear from several vegan-diet promoting groups that we don’t need to eat meat. This research would suggest that eating meat might have contributed to the development of the human intellect that we have today. As I have always said, and will continue to say, raising animals for food is not only necessary for a balanced healthy diet, but it is also an important part of being able to feed the world.

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