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 MuthukrishnaEvidence 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.”
Created: 6/13/2026, 12:15:31 AM
My Notes
Loading notes...