Wobber Victoria, Hare Brian, Wrangham Richard
Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Peabody Museum, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
J Hum Evol. 2008 Aug;55(2):340-8. doi: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2008.03.003. Epub 2008 May 16.
The cooking hypothesis proposes that a diet of cooked food was responsible for diverse morphological and behavioral changes in human evolution. However, it does not predict whether a preference for cooked food evolved before or after the control of fire. This question is important because the greater the preference shown by a raw-food-eating hominid for the properties present in cooked food, the more easily cooking should have been adopted following the control of fire. Here we use great apes to model food preferences by Paleolithic hominids. We conducted preference tests with various plant and animal foods to determine whether great apes prefer food items raw or cooked. We found that several populations of captive apes tended to prefer their food cooked, though with important exceptions. These results suggest that Paleolithic hominids would likewise have spontaneously preferred cooked food to raw, exapting a pre-existing preference for high-quality, easily chewed foods onto these cooked items. The results, therefore, challenge the hypothesis that the control of fire preceded cooking by a significant period.
烹饪假说认为，熟食饮食是人类进化过程中多种形态和行为变化的原因。然而，它并未预测对熟食的偏好是在掌握火之前还是之后进化而来的。这个问题很重要，因为以生食为主的原始人类对熟食中所具有特性的偏好越强烈，那么在掌握火之后采用烹饪方式就应该越容易。在这里，我们利用大型猿类来模拟旧石器时代原始人类的食物偏好。我们对各种植物和动物食物进行了偏好测试，以确定大型猿类更喜欢生食还是熟食。我们发现，几群圈养的猿类倾向于更喜欢熟食，不过也有重要的例外情况。这些结果表明，旧石器时代的原始人类同样会自发地更喜欢熟食而非生食，将对优质、易于咀嚼食物的既有偏好延伸到了这些熟食上。因此，这些结果对火的掌握先于烹饪一段很长时间的假说提出了挑战。
