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Food Preparation

Certainty Style Key
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True   Likely   Speculative
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Human Uniqueness Compared to "Great Apes": 
Relative Difference
MOCA Domain: 
Behavior
MOCA Topic Authors: 
Alyssa Crittenden
Margaret Schoeninger

Many primate species, including humans, practice various forms of food processing and modification of the physical structure of food. Food processing affects the rate of food intake, passage time, and absorption of nutrients. All human populations practice food preparation to varying degrees.

Among wild populations of chimpanzees, food preparation/extraction activities include crushing, pounding, or soaking of plant material, termite fishing, honey extraction, tuber digging, nut cracking, and use of spears to hunt. Orangutans also exhibit modification of fruits and use of tools for insect fishing. Complex plant modification is seen among gorilla populations that consume a wide array of herbaceous foods that are high in secondary compounds. In order to cosume many of these plant foods, gorillas employ hierarchically structured sequences of actions and flexible sub-routines to mechanically alter the plant before consumption.

The presence of food preparation among extant wild populations of great apes suggests, at the very least, that similar activities were undertaken by early hominins.

Related Talks: 
"Locomotion and Behavioral Ecology of the Earliest Hominids"
"Paleolithic Tool Industries"
"Uniquely-Human Adaptations to Meat-Eating"
Related MOCA Topics
Related Topics:
TitleCertainty
CookingTrue
CuisineTrue
Detoxifying/Removing AntinutrientsLikely
Food ComponentsLikely
Food HandlingTrue
Food TextureSpeculative
Requirements at Different Life StagesTrue
Tool MakingTrue
Tool Manufacture and UseTrue
Referenced By:
TitleCertainty
Detoxifying/Removing AntinutrientsNone
Food HandlingTrue
Home BaseTrue
Organized Gathering of FoodTrue
Requirements at Different Life StagesNone
Tool MakingTrue
Timing

Timing of Appearance of the Difference in the Hominin Lineage.

For this entry assume that

  • the common ancestor of humans and old world monkeys was 25000 thousand (25 million) years ago
  • the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees was 6000 thousand (6 million) years ago
  • the emergence of the genus Homo was 2000 thousand (2 million) years ago
  • the common ancestor of modern humans was 100 thousand years ago

 

Probable Appearance: 
6000 Thousand Years
Definite Appearance: 
2000 Thousand Years
References: 
  1. Boesch C. (1993) Aspects of transmission of tool-use in wild chimpanzees. In: Gibson KR, Ingold T, editors. Tools, language and cognition in human evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  2. Boesch C, Boesch H. (1983) Optimization of nut-cracking with natural hammers by wild chimpanzees. Behavior 83:265–86
  3. Boesch C, Boesch H. (1984) Possible causes of sex differences in the use of natural hammers by wild Chimpanzees. J Hum Evol 13:415–440.
  4. Byrne, R. (2001) Clever Hands: The Food Processing Skills of Mountain Gorillas. In: Robbins, M.M, Sicotte, P. and Steward, K.J., editors. Mountain Gorillas: Three Decades of Research at Karisoke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  5. Hernandez-Aguilar, R.A., J.J. Moore, T.R. Pickering (2007) Savanna chimpanzees use tools to harvest the underground storage organs of plants. Proc Natl Acad Sci 104(49): 19210–19213.
  6. Hohmann, G. (2009) The Diets of Non-Human Primates: Frugivory, Food Processing, and Food Sharing. In: Hublin, JJ, Richards MP, editors. The Evolution of Hominin Diets. Springer Netherlands.
  7. Pruetz, J. and P. Bertolani (2007) Savanna Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes verus, Hunt with Tools. Current Biology 17 (5): 412-417.
  8. Ragir, S.  (2000) Diet and food preparation: Rethinking early hominid behavior. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 9(4): 153-155.
  9. Toth, N. and K. Schick (2009) The Oldowan: The Tool Making of Early Hominins and Chimpanzees Compared. Annual Review of Anthropology 38: 289-305.
  10. Van Schaik, C.P., E.A. Fox, A.F. Sitompul (1996) Manufacture and use of tools in wild Sumatran Orangutans. Naturwissenschaften 83(4): 186-188.
  11. Van Schaik, C.P. and C.D. Knott (2001) Geographic variation in tool use on Neesia fruits in orangutans. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 114(4): 331-342.