Neanderthals carb loaded, helping grow their big brains

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Neanderthals carb loaded, helping grow their big brains

Postby Ltldogg » Mon May 10, 2021 7:10 pm

Exactly what Dr. McDougall has said:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/neanderthals-carb-loaded-helping-grow-their-big-brains?fbclid=IwAR25JwKM-liI0QT_DFcUJ1yt9Sa4PE-U09fhPVWX58oTynKomdXQ4lvfG2A

Highlights:

Neanderthals carb loaded, helping grow their big brains

“We sometimes have given short shrift to the plant components of the diet,” says anthropological geneticist Anne Stone of Arizona State University, Tempe. “As we know from modern hunter-gatherers, it’s often the gathering that ends up providing a substantial portion of the calories.”


The study is “groundbreaking,” says Harvard University evolutionary biologist Rachel Carmody, who was not part of the research. The work suggests the ancestors of both humans and Neanderthals were cooking lots of starchy foods at least 600,000 years ago. And they had already adapted to eating more starchy plants long before the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, she says.


“This pushes the importance of starch in the diet further back in time,” to when human brains were still expanding, Warinner says. Because the amylase enzyme is much more efficient at digesting cooked rather than raw starch, the finding also suggests cooking, too, was common by 600,000 years ago, Carmody says. Researchers have debated whether cooking became common when the big brain began to expand almost 2 million years ago or it spread later, during a second surge of growth.

The study offers a new way to detect major shifts in diet, says geneticist Ran Blekhman of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. In the case of Neanderthals, it reveals how much they depended on plants.
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Re: Neanderthals carb loaded, helping grow their big brains

Postby michaelswarm » Wed May 12, 2021 4:17 pm

Nice article. Coincidence that the author and all her sources are women scientists? The same author covered other evidence supporting the fire-starch-brain evolution theory over the last decade. (Follow links within the article to earlier articles written by the same author.) All supporting Richard Wrangham's fire made us human theory. Amazing Sherlock Holmes like analysis of evidence of fossil oral micro biome DNA.
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Re: Neanderthals carb loaded, helping grow their big brains

Postby Drew_ab » Sun May 16, 2021 12:02 pm

There's a great Youtube clip here that unpacks this topic further: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucP7bHrMylY
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Re: Neanderthals carb loaded, helping grow their big brains

Postby MINNIE » Mon May 24, 2021 3:54 pm

Good video. Thanks!

I read Wrangham and Peterson's book Demonic Males a few years ago Although it's not specifically about diet, there was some reference to data that early humans relied on starches, particularly tubers and roots. It made sense.
https://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Or ... 0395877431

And it's science, not paleofanstasy.
Speaking of which, this one does address human diet from an evolutionary science perspective.
Guess what? More starches :).

https://www.amazon.com/Paleofantasy-Evo ... 192&sr=1-2

It seems the root of our modern human malaise is that we aren't eating enough roots......
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