Relating the size of the skull and brain to the progress of the apes towards their supposed "humanity" was a normal doctrine among evolutionists. On that doctrine they based most of their deductions about how "advanced" certain apes were compared to others.
In the past yes, but not the present.
Blaming that woman for what she was convinced to say is a shameless act.
I do not blame the woman. I blame you for an anecdotal vague reference without a cited source.None the less as I stated earlier brain size does not in and of itself indicate increased intelligence, but nonetheless the following research determined that within the Homo Sapien species brain size and structure changed with the eating of meat. The research had nothing to do with earlier primates relative brain size.
Humans have been argued to be biologically adapted to a cooked diet, but this hypothesis has not been tested at the molecular level. Here, we combine controlled feeding experiments in mice with comparative primate genomics to show that consumption ...
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Genetic Evidence of Human Adaptation to a Cooked Diet
Rachel N. Carmody,1,†
Michael Dannemann,2,†
Adrian W. Briggs,1,3
Birgit Nickel,2
Emily E. Groopman,1,4
Richard W. Wrangham,1,‡ and
Janet Kelso2,*‡
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Abstract
Humans have been argued to be biologically adapted to a cooked diet, but this hypothesis has not been tested at the molecular level. Here, we combine controlled feeding experiments in mice with comparative primate genomics to show that consumption of a cooked diet influences gene expression and that affected genes bear signals of positive selection in the human lineage. Liver gene expression profiles in mice fed standardized diets of meat or tuber were affected by food type and cooking, but not by caloric intake or consumer energy balance. Genes affected by cooking were highly correlated with genes known to be differentially expressed in liver between humans and other primates, and more genes in this overlap set show signals of positive selection in humans than would be expected by chance. Sequence changes in the genes under selection appear before the split between modern humans and two archaic human groups, Neandertals and Denisovans, supporting the idea that human adaptation to a cooked diet had begun by at least 275,000 years ago.
Ancestral humans underwent marked increases in body size and brain volume coupled with reductions in tooth and gut size beginning approximately 2 Ma (Aiello and Wheeler 1995). These biological features indicate the consumption of an easier-to-digest diet with increased caloric density, and have been argued to reflect a heavier reliance on animal foods (Aiello and Wheeler 1995; Stanford and Bunn 2001; Milton 2003;
Introduction
Ancestral humans underwent marked increases in body size and brain volume coupled with reductions in tooth and gut size beginning approximately 2 Ma (
Aiello and Wheeler 1995). These biological features indicate the consumption of an easier-to-digest diet with increased caloric density, and have been argued to reflect a heavier reliance on animal foods (
Aiello and Wheeler 1995;
Stanford and Bunn 2001;
Milton 2003;
Speth 2010) and improved methods of food processing, including cooking (
Wrangham et al. 1999;
Wrangham and Carmody 2010). Cooking enhances nutrient digestibility and reduces diet-induced thermogenesis, thereby substantially increasing the energy gained from important hominin foods like meat and tubers (
Carmody and Wrangham 2009;
Carmody et al. 2011). Evidence that present-day humans cannot extract sufficient energy from uncooked wild diets, whether or not they include meat (
Koebnick et al. 1999), has led to the suggestion that hunter-gatherers are biologically committed to these benefits of cooking (
Wrangham and Conklin-Brittain 2003), including the provision of sufficient energy to fuel an exceptionally large brain (
Fonseca-Azevedo and Herculano-Houzel 2012). The hypothesis that cooked food is obligatory for modern humans predicts genetic signals of human adaptation to a cooked diet. Indirect evidence of such adaptation—including pseudogenization of the masticatory myosin gene (
MYH16) and of two bitter taste receptor genes (
TAS2R62 and
TAS2R64) after the split from the common ancestor with chimpanzee, but prior to the split from the common ancestor with Neandertals and Denisovans (
Perry et al. 2015)—encourages direct testing of this hypothesis.
Dietary modifications have previously been shown to cause genetic adaptation. Several populations with a legacy of dairying have acquired the ability to digest lactose into adulthood through persistence of the lactase enzyme (
Bersaglieri et al. 2004;
Gerbault et al. 2011), a trait that has evolved multiple times in the last approximately 7,000 years under strong positive selection (
Tishkoff et al. 2007;
Ranciaro et al. 2014). Additionally, populations with a history of consuming starch-rich foods have been argued to exhibit higher copy numbers of the gene encoding salivary amylase, the enzyme responsible for starch digestion in the mouth (
Perry et al. 2007). The adoption of cooking is thought to be partly responsible for this adaptive covariation, as amylase is inefficient at digesting starch unless it has been first gelatinized by heat (
Hardy et al. 2015). That diet-induced genetic adaptations exist among modern populations suggests that dietary modifications with longer evolutionary histories and broad systemic effects might produce more widespread genetic change.
Although the anatomical evidence from fossil
Homo suggests that cooking began in the Lower Paleolithic, archaeological evidence for the control of fire is weak until the Middle Paleolithic (
Gowlett and Wrangham 2013). Fire was certainly controlled by 250,000 years ago (
James 1989), but is evidenced only occasionally back to 400,000 years; the oldest widely accepted date of anthropogenic fire is from Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa at 1 Ma (
Berna et al. 2012). Although control of fire does not necessarily imply cooking, strong preferences for cooked items among great apes, combined with a readiness to wait for raw food to be cooked, suggest that cooking would likely have followed shortly thereafter (
Wobber et al. 2008;
Warneken and Rosati 2015). Notably, later putative dates for the origin of cooking overlap with the proposed split between modern humans and the last common ancestor of Neandertals and Denisovans, dated to between 275,000 and 765,000 years ago (
Prufer et al. 2014), making it unclear whether cooking was present in the last common ancestor of our clade. Gelatinized starch granules embedded in the dental calculus of Neandertals suggest they were consuming cooked plant items by 50,000 years ago (
Henry et al. 2011). However, sporadic evidence of fire use in cold-weather sites has led some to suggest that early Neandertals used fire opportunistically but did not control it (
Roebroeks and Villa 2011;
Sandgathe et al. 2011). Testing whether adaptation to a cooked diet occurred before or after the split between the modern human and Neandertal–Denisovan lineages could therefore help inform the timing of the control of fire.
worthy of note it has been known for a long time that cooking food developed within Homo Sapiens, Neanderthals, and possibly Denisovians and not present in closely related earlier primates with similar brain sizes.
Still no reliable reference to what? this woman said.
