The evolutionary significance of cooked food

Cooking is a uniquely human behavior that transforms food through physical and chemical processes, making it easier to consume and digest while increasing the energy we can extract from it. Cooking may also have broadened the human dietary niche by detoxifying foods and reducing foodborne pathogens, while the control of fire may have made otherwise difficult-to-obtain foods, such as honey, more accessible. By increasing the net energetic returns and diversity of the diet, cooking and fire use may have contributed to a suite of adaptations consistent with higher dietary quality that emerged in our lineage approximately 2 million years ago, including energetically costly increases in body size and relative brain size accompanied by reductions in digestive structures. Although the archaeological record of early fire use has long shaped debates about when cooking became evolutionarily important, recent evidence from South Africa and Kenya supports the plausibility of cooking during this critical evolutionary transition. In this talk, I will examine cooking as a major evolutionary innovation and its broader role in shaping human dietary adaptation.