ArticleFrontiers in neuroscience2016
Human Brain Expansion during Evolution Is Independent of Fire Control and Cooking.
Article in Frontiers in neuroscience, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- A bioenergetic approach favors the preservation and protection of prey, not cooking, as the drivers of early fire.Frontiers in nutrition · 2025Article
- Is obesity the next step in evolution through brain changes?Neuroscience applied · 2024Article
- Sleep Pathologies and Eating Disorders: A Crossroad for Neurology, Psychiatry and Nutrition.Nutrients · 2023Review
- From fossils to mind.Communications biology · 2023Review
- The evolution of synaptic and cognitive capacity: Insights from the nervous system transcriptome ofProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Reconstructing Hominin Diets with Stable Isotope Analysis of Amino Acids: New Perspectives and Future Directions.Bioscience · 2022Article
- ALS/FTD: Evolution, Aging, and Cellular Metabolic Exhaustion.Frontiers in neurology · 2022Article
- The Possible Role of Body Temperature in Modulating Brain and Body Sizes in Hominin Evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- DHEAS and Human Development: An Evolutionary Perspective.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2020Article
- Cerebral cortical folding, parcellation, and connectivity in humans, nonhuman primates, and mice.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Meat and Nicotinamide: A Causal Role in Human Evolution, History, and Demographics.International journal of tryptophan research : IJTR · 2017Review
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
What makes humans unique? This question has fascinated scientists and philosophers for centuries and it is still a matter of intense debate. Nowadays, human brain expansion during evolution has been acknowledged to explain our empowered cognitive capabilities. The drivers for such accelerated expansion remain, however, largely unknown. In this sense, studies have suggested that the cooking of food could be a pre-requisite for the expansion of brain size in early hominins. However, this appealing hypothesis is only supported by a mathematical model suggesting that the increasing number of neurons in the brain would constrain body size among primates due to a limited amount of calories obtained from diets. Here, we show, by using a similar mathematical model, that a tradeoff between body mass and the number of brain neurons imposed by dietary constraints during hominin evolution is unlikely. Instead, the predictable number of neurons in the hominin brain varies much more in function of foraging efficiency than body mass. We also review archeological data to show that the expansion of the brain volume in the hominin lineage is described by a linear function independent of evidence of fire control, and therefore, thermal processing of food does not account for this phenomenon. Finally, we report experiments in mice showing that thermal processing of meat does not increase its caloric availability in mice. Altogether, our data indicate that cooking is neither sufficient nor necessary to explain hominin brain expansion.
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