Re: Disc Compatibility?

On 3/7/2025 8:35 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

 Primitive man was a pyromaniac.  Whenever the necessary combustibles
and appropriate weather were available, primitive man would start and
tend a fire.  Most sources claim that the fire was mostly to keep man
warm during various ice ages.  However, I believe the man was
hypnotized by the flickering flame.
 At some point in the distance past, man set fire to his dinner and
thus invented cooking. 

I read an interesting article claiming that fire may have been critical to evolution of humans. The claim was that cooking makes food much easier to digest, and thus extract nutritional calories.
Since our large brains consume an outsized portion of our calories, that cooking over fire was necessary to the evolution of large brains. Without cooking, the theory goes, large brained proto-humans would have starved.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC124895/
"In the average adult human, the brain represents about 2% of the body weight. Remarkably, despite its relatively small size, the brain accounts for about 20% of the oxygen and, hence, calories consumed by the body."
--
- Frank Krygowski