Neanderthals cooked and ate vegetables

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12071424

by nice1 • 16 years ago

49 20 16 years ago

bbc.co.uk

wallflower2• 16 years ago

It is barely alluded to in the article but the reason this is significant is that humans are the only animals that can make fire and cook their food. This may change the evolutionary timeline.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human

tokenadult• 16 years ago

The finding about Neanderthals is not at all unexpected based on lines of research more than a decade old (at least). It has been known for some time that hominin species who predated Homo sapiens made fires and cooked food. This information is well incorporated in the current evolutionary timeline.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/06/invention-of-c...

Cooking was essential in the development of the ancestral line leading to Homo sapiens (for what it allowed in changes in body structure) but it is not a defining characteristic of the difference between species Homo sapiens and earlier species or contemporary species in the genus.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

Many people mistakenly believe that the defining characteristic of humanity is the ability to use tools. More fundamentally it is technology, the ability to learn and to teach and to create new tools which makes humans special. And thus the ability to surpass genetic evolution via technological evolution.

Scriptor2• 16 years ago

People are missing the point of this article. It's not that they used fire, it's that Neanderthals used it to cook vegetables when previously we thought they just ate meat.

gus_massa• 16 years ago

Homo Erectus (1.9MM - 0.1MM yeas ago) probably controlled fire (perhaps they can not make a new fire, but they probably can keep it burning). I am not sure if there is any evidence that they cooked with it, but when you have a fireplace for one million year ... more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus#Sociality )

And Homo Neanderthalensis probably can have invited you to a barbeque :) .

meric• 16 years ago

(Ancestral) Human history goes all the way back for over a million years. If the year of my birth was generated with a random number between 2 million B.C and 2010 AD there is only a one in two hundred thousandth chance of landing in the past ten years... You could've taken off the last 2010 years and you wouldn't have changed the range much.

Neanderthals cooked and ate vegetables

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