consumption of cooked meat.
3. As humans evolved they were able to more easily obtain the energy needed from a reduced intake of food (not to mention the increased vitamins and minerals present in meat) which meant they stood a reduced risk from malnutrition and starvation. Those better able to obtain calories from food would have been better able to reproduce and as a result pass on their superior genes.
So, the ability to successfully barbeque on a regular basis meant our ancestors evolved smaller guts, smaller teeth and smaller jaws, and also evolved to have bigger brains, characteristic of modern day humans. However, these are only the physical traits that evolved from our ability to barbeque, and what separates humans from other primates extends far beyond our physical characteristics. Yes, the human ability to barbeque also drove our social and cultural evolution.
Barbeque maketh-the-man.
The collection, preparation and cooking of meat has also had a longstanding effect on how our human societies and distinctively human behaviours evolved. Meat can be found by chance, and indeed for early humans, carrion would have been the main source. For a more reliable source of meat you need to hunt for it, and hunting requires co-operation and a unique set of social developments. When hunting, there is always the risk that you will come home empty handed.
Sharing meat between members of your own species means that if one hunting party comes back unsuccessful, the success of another hunting party will benefit the wider group. This, however, only works if there is an understanding of the moral standards among the group.
It is no chance then, that the sharing of food to unrelated members of your own species is a uniquely human attribute. However, the link between barbeque and hunting goes deeper than this, in fact you cannot hunt unless you have the ability to barbeque. If we ate the same raw diet as big apes we would need to spend five hours a day chewing, compared to the thirty-six minutes a day which we now average.
So if Homo erectus was not able to cook what he hunted, he would have to spend an additional five hours a day eating what he had hunted, this is on top of the time it took him to hunt in the first place. This doesn’t even consider that he might not have a successful hunt, in which case he would have to go out and gather additional raw food and then spend another five hours chewing and digesting it. The ability to hunt, and provide a reliable source of meat, is therefore dependent on higher levels of social relationships between members of your species and the ability to barbeque.
Once early humans had the ability to barbeque, they also had the ability to provide light, which meant they were able to prepare and consume food after dark. This gave them additional time in which to prepare, cook and eat food, something that species without access to fire were unable to do. This is in addition to the extra protection that a fire gave early humans in their ability to ward off predators, a very real problem when they were not the top of the food chain.
Another uniquely human trait is that almost all cultures have similar, well-defined meal patterns compared to our primate cousins, who don’t have breakfast, lunch and dinner, unless you are a primate who lives in a zoo. Cooking meant that mealtimes had to be a cooperative and social affair, so that those providing the meat knew when they needed to be present to consume it and those tending the fire knew when to light it and be prepared to watch it. This meant that early pitmasters had to be more static than their ancestors.
One side effect of cooking over a wood fire is that the incomplete combustion of wood releases harmful compounds, namely Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs). Studies of our genome versus that of Neanderthals has revealed that we are able to synthesize PAHs more effectively than our primate counterparts. What this means is that we have effectively evolved to be more resilient to the harmful effects of cooking over a wood fire than our primate counterparts. This then begs the question, are we the only human species still in existence because not only were we able to deliberately barbeque meat, but also evolve to not be effected by the harmful compounds that allowed us to cook it in the first place?
What did the first barbeque look and taste like?
Homo habilis was the first of our ancestors to barbeque meat, but what we do not know was what the first barbeque looked, smelled and tasted like and how it came to be. Homo habilis would have had the ability to keep a log slowly burning on the ground whilst they slept in trees, where perhaps they may have dropped a few morsels of raw meat onto the slowly burning log and found them in the morning. But let’s go back to where we started, A.A. Gill, and see what he thought the first barbeque looked like. He challenges quote that too-often makes an appearance on the walls of gastropubs, “it was a brave man who first ate an oyster”, which he states isn’t the case, and contends that:
“the really brave man was the first man that ate a burnt animal. Can you imagine how terrifying that must have been? All you’ve ever seen of fire is horrifying, and suddenly you come across this thing that stinks of death and burning…and the missus says…I bet you wouldn’t eat that? But he does…and it changes everything. Eating big bits of meat…eating big animals, means cooperation. If you cook it, you can feed old people with bad teeth and young people with no teeth.”
The Author. Jason Wood is an avid backyard barbecue chef, cooking almost solely on his Weber he loves all aspects of barbecue and what it has to offer. He recently completed a Master’s in Business Administration at the University of Northampton where was awarded a distinction for his dissertation on research into the sustainability of the UK barbecue food industry. He runs an emergent blog on barbecue, smoking and what he likes to call ‘barbecology’, an area he aims to blog more on some of the wider aspects of barbecue beyond just the recipes. To find out more go to www.hopsmokefire.com.
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