
Did Cooking in HotSprings Make Human's Brainy? - jkuria
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/05/25/did-cooking-in-hot-springs-make-humans-brainy
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caymanjim
Is this headline perversion meant to be a joke?

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wolf550e
The headline in the economist is saner. Submitter edited the headline.

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wavefunction
This submitter's headline isn't even grammatically correct.

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astazangasta
I'd make a population based argument against this. If the idea is that cooking
allows more nutrients which allows the brain to expand, then it would have to
be available to the entire human population for the genes to spread. Meanwhile
going to a fucking hot spring to dip your meat in would seem to be a scarce
resource.

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inawarminister
Well, if the founding population of human species only consist of hundreds of
beings that lived around a region with lots of natural hotsprings, it's
believable.

Reminds me of that hypothesis that modern humans stayed in Africa until very
late (60,000kya) because we were relying on one lake with clams that have
protein needed for brain synthesis, until somebody get the mutation to make it
ourself. I forgot the exact details, though...

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astazangasta
Sounds like this:
[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/02/060221090456.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/02/060221090456.htm)

Anyway it is horseshit. A lot of just-soing.

Also a population of hundreds is insufficient - it means a million years of
evolution would have to take place in a tiny genetic background insufficient
to yield much genetic heterogeneity - the other necessary piece to produce
evolution.

