Investigating the role of food processing in human evolution: a niche construction approach
- PDF / 289,114 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 87 Downloads / 143 Views
ORIGINAL PAPER
Investigating the role of food processing in human evolution: a niche construction approach Michèle M. Wollstonecroft
Received: 5 January 2011 / Accepted: 8 March 2011 / Published online: 5 April 2011 # Springer-Verlag 2011
Abstract While it is generally agreed that food processing has had a role in human evolution, the specific ways that is has affected our evolution are not well understood. Using a Niche Construction Theory (NCT) perspective, coupled with methodologies borrowed from “post-harvest” research in the plant sciences, this paper investigates the means and mechanism by which food processing is of evolutionary consequence. The central tenet of NCT is that organisms have an active role in their own evolution through reciprocal interactions with their environments; niche construction is understood to occur when organisms initiate long-term changes to their environments that modify the selection pressures on themselves and their descendants (and on other organisms in the environment). Humans and our hominin ancestors are considered to be the ultimate niche constructors due to our ability to modify selection pressures through diverse culturally generated and transmitted cultural means, i.e. cultural niche construction. In this paper, post-harvest methods are used to identify how food processing could feasibly have permitted hominins to modify their evolutionary selection pressures. Food processing is shown to facilitate access to increasing amounts of digestible nutrients and energy (kilocalories/kilojoules) as well as promoting increased dietary breadth and making possible the production of safer and more stable foods. It is argued that these advancements catalysed related technological and ecological skills and knowledge, which together with the nutritional benefits, further triggered changes in hominin brain and body and locomotory adaptations and increased longevity, disease prevention and juvenile survival rates.
M. M. Wollstonecroft (*) UCL Institute of Archaeology, 31-34 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PY, UK e-mail: [email protected]
Keywords Food processing . Niche construction . Human evolution . Post-harvest research
Introduction The idea that food processing has had a role in human evolution has only recently begun to be debated by anthropologists and archaeologists (e.g. Jones 2009; Milton 2003; Wrangham et al. 1999; Carmody and Wrangham 2009). More often than not, however, food processing is regarded as an end product of previous evolutionary changes such as increased brain size, advances in cognition and dexterity, rather than as a cause of change, e.g. although it is recognised as evidence of our ancestors' departure from the pre-human dietary pattern it is nevertheless typically regarded as an adaptation rather than an initiator of evolution (Milton 2003, 56). Yet, a more active evolutionary role is suggested by the time-depth and universality of food processing, which dates back to at least our earliest Homo ancestors, coupled with recent genetic studies that indicat
Data Loading...
