causal

Cooked food and fire as early cultural knowledge

Human jaws are too weak and guts too short to process raw food like gorillas, implying we relied on cooked food and therefore fire millions of years ago; since fire-making cannot be figured out de novo and we have no genes for it, fire knowledge must have been culturally transmitted, constituting some of the earliest evidence of accumulated cultural information.

causalpending

Speaker

Michael Muthukrishna

Evidence Quote

we needed fire to survive and we don't have any genes for it. It's got to have been culturally transmitted. You couldn't have figured it out.

Source

255 | Michael Muthukrishna on Developing a Theory of EveryoneSean Carroll's Mindscape
Created: 6/13/2026, 12:15:31 AM

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