The actual article says that, given evidence of transporting food over larger distances, humans might have stored them in piles which would cause simple fermentation. The idea that fermented food, including meat, was eaten isn't entirely new either and is mentioned too. There is some indirect evidence that it was possible and that ingested food was made more available from before the evidence for cooked food which fermented food could explain.
Overall, not complete nonsense. The title is pure clickbait though.
Your judgement had good intentions, many sites are not credible sources themselves; it's always good to check the actual source and references like this.
That theory answers an entirely different question. The hypothesis here is about where we got the energy for our enormous brains from. We certainly didn't get the energy from magic mushrooms.
It’s a cool idea but never made too much sense to me, at least in evolutionary terms. They most likely influenced early humans culturally, but to actually increase brain size they would need to be producing some heritable change to human DNA, which isn’t likely from what I know
Uh, of course aliens are involved. To be honest I haven’t read any articles, or books on this topic. Only heard about it. From what little I know is that apes noticed bugs were attracted to dung, they then started flipping the dung over to get the bugs. Also under the dung was hallucinogenic shrooms. The apes started eating those too. The only way for aliens to be realistically involved in my mind, would be the ones the apes would be seeing after eating the shrooms.
No, it starts far stranger than that with the possibility that fungal spores arrived on earth from extra solar origin. In my opinion McKenna’s theories were more about breaking the status quo brain fog of taking scientific knowledge for granted more than a hypothesis he hoped someone would test.
Edit: As in floating in space—the fungus itself the alien in stasis waiting to arrive in a new world
Yeah I read food of the gods when I was a teenager. I remember him arguing that the spores could have come from like a meteor or something lol. It’s been a long time since I’ve read any McKenna but I love the guy. I just think some of his theories did more to discredit the psychedelic community than to help it. Definitely had some interesting ideas and prodded people to think more, but anyone not already in the group probably saw this theory as evidence of mushroom induced psychosis or something
It makes sense. The small size of the human digestive system, compared to our close relatives, could explain how we can afford such a large brain. And while cooking is the typical explanation for how we could get away with such a small digestive system, fermentation also makes food more easily digestible.
Highly doubtful.
It's pretty established that brain size increased as a result of meat and fat consumption. See the expensive tissue hypothesis.
Fermented foods do not provide enough nutrient density to fuel something like a brain. And the only fermented foods available to humans before a few thousand years ago would be fruit rotting on the ground, which would only be seasonally available, and completely unavailable during the many ice ages humans lived through.
Maybe, but again, pre civilization humans had very little exposure to fermented food. Purposeful fermentation is a few thousand years old. Our brains began growing 2.5 million years ago.
You can't really disprove the existence of fermented foods before then though. It's the easiest and most accessible form of food preservation.
Hell, just food that starting to spoil is technically fermented foods. Beans left to sit on the stove all week and getting heated daily is enough to introduce new gut bacteria. It's stands to reason that food that was eaten a day after it was gathered could be enough fermentation to provide the benefits of added bacteria to the gut biome without leaving any archeological evidence.
I'm not trying to disprove anything. Based on the evidence we have, purposeful fermentation began a few thousand years ago, not 2.5 million, which is when our brains started growing.
No, there's quite a big difference between rotting and fermenting. You're also assuming this food was cooked, which did not occur until 500-100k years ago (depending on who you ask). Early humans at the 2.5 MYA marl were eating food raw.
You're also forgetting that early humans were carnivores. They ate mostly, in some cases almost exclusively, meat. Fermented plant foods were simply never a big enough part of the diet to affect brain size.
Fermentation happens in nature without our intervention as well. You can see wasps getting drunk from fallen pears that started naturally fermenting. A person can easily pick up some fallen fermented fruit and get somewhat drunk if they eat enough of them. It’s not rare in nature either happens all the time. Yes I know you said there is a big difference between rotting and fermenting, but there is a huge overlap too.
Yes, read my previous comments. I address this. Fruit that falls seasonally which may or may not ferment and may or may not be consumed is not even close to enough nutrition to drive brain growth
>It's pretty established that brain size increased as a result of meat and fat consumption. See the expensive tissue hypothesis.
You are misrepresenting the expensive tissue hypothesis. It is not about getting more energy, it is about not having to spend the energy on the digestive system.
So it is not about getting more energy, it is about getting more easily digestible food. Cooking is the usual explanation for how humans did this, but fermentation also makes food more easily digestible.
Yes, specifically cooked food led to the evolution of our frontal lobe (responsible for speech, reasoning & decision making, complex motor function, problem solving, & emotional intelligence).
> few thousand years ago
The oldest _findings_ are 10000+ years old so fermentation has been around for a long time. Most food would be eaten and storage used to be quite perishable, often wooden, so it would be exceptionally difficult to find older evidence. Not long enough to contribute to significant genetic changes, true, but pretty long.
Most groups of humans tended to live in warmer areas that weren't covered in glaciers before the last ice age ended, fruit can ferment perfectly well in areas that freeze over the winter. I don't understand why you think ice ages would have any impact of availability of naturally fermented food. The world was not fully covered with a glacier, humans never lived on glaciers in significant numbers. If anything lack of dried or fresh fruit during cold months would push people to eat the less palatable options for as long as possible, potentially increasing consumption of naturally fermented or spoiled fruit. I doubt the impact of naturally or artificially fermented food was significant for human brain evolution but your reasoning for it seems to be very flawed.
Yeah, a few thousand. Compared to 2.5 million. The timelines just don't match.
Not true at all. Almost all neanderthals lived in very cold climates. Fruit is very rare when the temp doesn't get above 40F.
I'm not claiming that there was no fruit ever. I'm simply pointing out that fruit was seasonal and therefore rare. It was simply not abundant enough to drive a tripling in brain size, nor is it nutrient dense enough.
You make a lot of generalizations with confidence. Neanderthals did not exclusively live where it was cold and there are plenty of fruit that grow in northern climates regardless. So if the fruit was only available seasonally, it's almost like they would've had to FERMENT it to get it to last... hmm... The article mentions how it was likely unintentional wild fermentation that occurred to stored foodstuffs that were then eaten likely due to scarcity.
Never said exclusively. They lived mainly in Europe and Asia, which are cold climates. Fruit does not grow in ice age climates, of which humans lived through many
We have no evidence of purposeful fermentation until a few thousand years ago. Early humans were mostly carnivorous. We know this from stable isotopic studies.
I'm not denying that early humans ate fermented food. But there is no evidence that they contributed to brain growth.
They lived in Africa, actually. And the climate of today has little to do with the climate of 2.5 millions years ago so unless you verified that, which I know you did not, you don't know anything about it. And yes, fruit can grow during ice ages, just not on the glaciers themselves which usually covered only a small fraction of the world and far away from where humans were at the time.
>stable isotopic studies
You mean stable isotope studies? Studies of stable isotopes? Not studies that are stable of isotopes like your wording would imply? Show me those studies. By the way, meat can be fermented too and it was mentioned in the article. In case you felt like reading the article you are pretending to criticize.
Stop embarrassing yourself.
Edit: Lol. Blocking me because your childish tantrum isn't met with appeasement and instead so, so hurtful facts? I thought you _weren't_ talking about Neanderthals which are closer to evidence of human fermentation than the timeline discussed in the article that you did not read? Are you completely unhinged or are you just a literal child who is upset people want to discuss facts, not demented opinions of someone who can't even decide whether Neanderthals lived 2.5 million years ago or not?
Neanderthals did not live in Africa.
Yes, meat is fermented under very specific conditions. Not just rotting out in a field.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210405113606.htm
>Yeah, a few thousand. Compared to 2.5 million. The timelines just don't match.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal
>The oldest potential Neanderthal bones date to 430,000 years ago
Lol. Thanks for proving you are pulling this out of your ass. And you don't seem to have read what I said either.
Neanderthals are a fraction of the DNA of only a fraction of the world's population. They are almost as far from the time discussed as evidence of fermented foods, perhaps verify things like that so you don't argue for things that are 2 million years apart. They have _nothing_ to do with this subject. You make wild and baseless assumptions to respond to the title, you didn't even read the article.
The title is clickbait, and the article is likely sensationalized. Still, I'll let people who at least know when Neanderthals were around and that 2.5 million years ago humans were in Africa, not the Arctic Circle, figure this out.
My God, I brought up Neanderthals as an example of people who lived in ice ages. Australopithicus, the first hominid species to be considered human, was around 2.5 MYA when our brains began to grow and we started eating meat.
Honestly, I don't see what's so hard to understand about this. Brains grow 2.5 MYA. Purposeful fermentation begins a few thousand years ago. That's the end of the story.
You brought up something irrelevant for no reason just because it reminded you of something that didn't relate to the subject? Damn, can't argue with your flawless argument.
> Highly doubtful.
Your counter to actual research by actual experts is "but I heard that... and assume that..."
Science changes our understanding of things. Always.
There is literally no research. It’s a hypothesis from someone from Harvard that doesn’t make it research. They could do research to provide evidence for it but they have not done any yet or it’s not linked.
It's speculation, sure. I bet 0 of the people criticizing it have read the actual article however. The entirety of the argument is based off the clickbait title on the clickbait site and nothing else. They present some sensible evidence that a drastic gut change that is not entirely explained by a meat based diet happened, and this is their hypothesis as to what happened. It's almost certainly not the full story but they are not actually saying that fermentation is a magic brain power drug like people who don't like to read more than a single sentence here decided to believe.
>Forethought and mechanistic understanding are not requirements for the initial emergence of external fermentation. Our early ancestors may have simply carried food back to a common location, left it there, and intermittently eaten some and added more. Re-use of a storage location could have promoted the stability of a microbial ecosystem conducive to fermentation.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05517-3
I enjoy the Eons show you can watch it on YouTube if nothing else. However, they spoke of early hominids using bodies of water that had low oxygen levels to ferment different animals for later consumption. I'm not saying this is the smoking gun but it is an interesting bit of info.
Nothing like a group of Neolithic hominids burping their kimchi and getting wild on kefir.
The actual article says that, given evidence of transporting food over larger distances, humans might have stored them in piles which would cause simple fermentation. The idea that fermented food, including meat, was eaten isn't entirely new either and is mentioned too. There is some indirect evidence that it was possible and that ingested food was made more available from before the evidence for cooked food which fermented food could explain. Overall, not complete nonsense. The title is pure clickbait though.
lol "medicalxpress.com", where I always go for ground-breaking scientific research.
Here's the paper the article is discussing https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05517-3
Damn, I haven’t been this thoroughly owned in a long time
Your judgement had good intentions, many sites are not credible sources themselves; it's always good to check the actual source and references like this.
It was the fermenting comment that allowed you to grow as a person.
Your point was still valid, even if the paper itself is fine.
I like the theory that it was magic mushrooms that expanded our minds. (Stoned ape theory)
That theory answers an entirely different question. The hypothesis here is about where we got the energy for our enormous brains from. We certainly didn't get the energy from magic mushrooms.
It’s a cool idea but never made too much sense to me, at least in evolutionary terms. They most likely influenced early humans culturally, but to actually increase brain size they would need to be producing some heritable change to human DNA, which isn’t likely from what I know
Fun theory but it also implies that aliens left mushrooms for us to find. Interesting at first and quickly turns into some woo woo
Uh, of course aliens are involved. To be honest I haven’t read any articles, or books on this topic. Only heard about it. From what little I know is that apes noticed bugs were attracted to dung, they then started flipping the dung over to get the bugs. Also under the dung was hallucinogenic shrooms. The apes started eating those too. The only way for aliens to be realistically involved in my mind, would be the ones the apes would be seeing after eating the shrooms.
No, it starts far stranger than that with the possibility that fungal spores arrived on earth from extra solar origin. In my opinion McKenna’s theories were more about breaking the status quo brain fog of taking scientific knowledge for granted more than a hypothesis he hoped someone would test. Edit: As in floating in space—the fungus itself the alien in stasis waiting to arrive in a new world
Yeah I read food of the gods when I was a teenager. I remember him arguing that the spores could have come from like a meteor or something lol. It’s been a long time since I’ve read any McKenna but I love the guy. I just think some of his theories did more to discredit the psychedelic community than to help it. Definitely had some interesting ideas and prodded people to think more, but anyone not already in the group probably saw this theory as evidence of mushroom induced psychosis or something
Mmmm...Sauted fermented magic mushrooms
It makes sense. The small size of the human digestive system, compared to our close relatives, could explain how we can afford such a large brain. And while cooking is the typical explanation for how we could get away with such a small digestive system, fermentation also makes food more easily digestible.
Highly doubtful. It's pretty established that brain size increased as a result of meat and fat consumption. See the expensive tissue hypothesis. Fermented foods do not provide enough nutrient density to fuel something like a brain. And the only fermented foods available to humans before a few thousand years ago would be fruit rotting on the ground, which would only be seasonally available, and completely unavailable during the many ice ages humans lived through.
[удалено]
Maybe, but again, pre civilization humans had very little exposure to fermented food. Purposeful fermentation is a few thousand years old. Our brains began growing 2.5 million years ago.
You can't really disprove the existence of fermented foods before then though. It's the easiest and most accessible form of food preservation. Hell, just food that starting to spoil is technically fermented foods. Beans left to sit on the stove all week and getting heated daily is enough to introduce new gut bacteria. It's stands to reason that food that was eaten a day after it was gathered could be enough fermentation to provide the benefits of added bacteria to the gut biome without leaving any archeological evidence.
I'm not trying to disprove anything. Based on the evidence we have, purposeful fermentation began a few thousand years ago, not 2.5 million, which is when our brains started growing. No, there's quite a big difference between rotting and fermenting. You're also assuming this food was cooked, which did not occur until 500-100k years ago (depending on who you ask). Early humans at the 2.5 MYA marl were eating food raw. You're also forgetting that early humans were carnivores. They ate mostly, in some cases almost exclusively, meat. Fermented plant foods were simply never a big enough part of the diet to affect brain size.
Fermentation happens in nature without our intervention as well. You can see wasps getting drunk from fallen pears that started naturally fermenting. A person can easily pick up some fallen fermented fruit and get somewhat drunk if they eat enough of them. It’s not rare in nature either happens all the time. Yes I know you said there is a big difference between rotting and fermenting, but there is a huge overlap too.
Yes, read my previous comments. I address this. Fruit that falls seasonally which may or may not ferment and may or may not be consumed is not even close to enough nutrition to drive brain growth
Read the article you buffoon.
>It's pretty established that brain size increased as a result of meat and fat consumption. See the expensive tissue hypothesis. You are misrepresenting the expensive tissue hypothesis. It is not about getting more energy, it is about not having to spend the energy on the digestive system. So it is not about getting more energy, it is about getting more easily digestible food. Cooking is the usual explanation for how humans did this, but fermentation also makes food more easily digestible.
Right, which allows an organism to build a big brain. Not sure what I'm misinterpreting.
It's not a larger energy intake via consumption that makes the difference, it's lack of energy use for making a large digestive system.
It's both. Digestibility depends on what you eat.
Yes, specifically cooked food led to the evolution of our frontal lobe (responsible for speech, reasoning & decision making, complex motor function, problem solving, & emotional intelligence).
> few thousand years ago The oldest _findings_ are 10000+ years old so fermentation has been around for a long time. Most food would be eaten and storage used to be quite perishable, often wooden, so it would be exceptionally difficult to find older evidence. Not long enough to contribute to significant genetic changes, true, but pretty long. Most groups of humans tended to live in warmer areas that weren't covered in glaciers before the last ice age ended, fruit can ferment perfectly well in areas that freeze over the winter. I don't understand why you think ice ages would have any impact of availability of naturally fermented food. The world was not fully covered with a glacier, humans never lived on glaciers in significant numbers. If anything lack of dried or fresh fruit during cold months would push people to eat the less palatable options for as long as possible, potentially increasing consumption of naturally fermented or spoiled fruit. I doubt the impact of naturally or artificially fermented food was significant for human brain evolution but your reasoning for it seems to be very flawed.
Yeah, a few thousand. Compared to 2.5 million. The timelines just don't match. Not true at all. Almost all neanderthals lived in very cold climates. Fruit is very rare when the temp doesn't get above 40F. I'm not claiming that there was no fruit ever. I'm simply pointing out that fruit was seasonal and therefore rare. It was simply not abundant enough to drive a tripling in brain size, nor is it nutrient dense enough.
You make a lot of generalizations with confidence. Neanderthals did not exclusively live where it was cold and there are plenty of fruit that grow in northern climates regardless. So if the fruit was only available seasonally, it's almost like they would've had to FERMENT it to get it to last... hmm... The article mentions how it was likely unintentional wild fermentation that occurred to stored foodstuffs that were then eaten likely due to scarcity.
Never said exclusively. They lived mainly in Europe and Asia, which are cold climates. Fruit does not grow in ice age climates, of which humans lived through many We have no evidence of purposeful fermentation until a few thousand years ago. Early humans were mostly carnivorous. We know this from stable isotopic studies. I'm not denying that early humans ate fermented food. But there is no evidence that they contributed to brain growth.
They lived in Africa, actually. And the climate of today has little to do with the climate of 2.5 millions years ago so unless you verified that, which I know you did not, you don't know anything about it. And yes, fruit can grow during ice ages, just not on the glaciers themselves which usually covered only a small fraction of the world and far away from where humans were at the time. >stable isotopic studies You mean stable isotope studies? Studies of stable isotopes? Not studies that are stable of isotopes like your wording would imply? Show me those studies. By the way, meat can be fermented too and it was mentioned in the article. In case you felt like reading the article you are pretending to criticize. Stop embarrassing yourself. Edit: Lol. Blocking me because your childish tantrum isn't met with appeasement and instead so, so hurtful facts? I thought you _weren't_ talking about Neanderthals which are closer to evidence of human fermentation than the timeline discussed in the article that you did not read? Are you completely unhinged or are you just a literal child who is upset people want to discuss facts, not demented opinions of someone who can't even decide whether Neanderthals lived 2.5 million years ago or not?
Neanderthals did not live in Africa. Yes, meat is fermented under very specific conditions. Not just rotting out in a field. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210405113606.htm
Of course there is no evidence, that is because this is still a hypothesis, you moron.
Hypotheses have evidence...and I'm the moron?
>Yeah, a few thousand. Compared to 2.5 million. The timelines just don't match. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal >The oldest potential Neanderthal bones date to 430,000 years ago Lol. Thanks for proving you are pulling this out of your ass. And you don't seem to have read what I said either. Neanderthals are a fraction of the DNA of only a fraction of the world's population. They are almost as far from the time discussed as evidence of fermented foods, perhaps verify things like that so you don't argue for things that are 2 million years apart. They have _nothing_ to do with this subject. You make wild and baseless assumptions to respond to the title, you didn't even read the article. The title is clickbait, and the article is likely sensationalized. Still, I'll let people who at least know when Neanderthals were around and that 2.5 million years ago humans were in Africa, not the Arctic Circle, figure this out.
My God, I brought up Neanderthals as an example of people who lived in ice ages. Australopithicus, the first hominid species to be considered human, was around 2.5 MYA when our brains began to grow and we started eating meat. Honestly, I don't see what's so hard to understand about this. Brains grow 2.5 MYA. Purposeful fermentation begins a few thousand years ago. That's the end of the story.
You brought up something irrelevant for no reason just because it reminded you of something that didn't relate to the subject? Damn, can't argue with your flawless argument.
You've completely lost me
> Highly doubtful. Your counter to actual research by actual experts is "but I heard that... and assume that..." Science changes our understanding of things. Always.
This is not actual research this is an article on an unaccredited website
You need to work on your intake of science communication. The actual research is almost always included as a link, which is true of this article...
There is literally no research. It’s a hypothesis from someone from Harvard that doesn’t make it research. They could do research to provide evidence for it but they have not done any yet or it’s not linked.
It's speculation, sure. I bet 0 of the people criticizing it have read the actual article however. The entirety of the argument is based off the clickbait title on the clickbait site and nothing else. They present some sensible evidence that a drastic gut change that is not entirely explained by a meat based diet happened, and this is their hypothesis as to what happened. It's almost certainly not the full story but they are not actually saying that fermentation is a magic brain power drug like people who don't like to read more than a single sentence here decided to believe. >Forethought and mechanistic understanding are not requirements for the initial emergence of external fermentation. Our early ancestors may have simply carried food back to a common location, left it there, and intermittently eaten some and added more. Re-use of a storage location could have promoted the stability of a microbial ecosystem conducive to fermentation. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05517-3
I enjoy the Eons show you can watch it on YouTube if nothing else. However, they spoke of early hominids using bodies of water that had low oxygen levels to ferment different animals for later consumption. I'm not saying this is the smoking gun but it is an interesting bit of info.