If early humans found out that if they cooked meat it was better for them, why did it take thousands of years for us to find out about germs?
In: Biology
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Germs or lack thereof are not what makes meat better when cooked. The cooking process breaks down the nutrients in food and makes it easier to digest food more completely, making it more nutritious for you. This is especially true for plants, which have lots of starches that we can’t digest normally
Humans have understood that uncooked foods and unclean foods can make us sick for thousands of years.
It’s just that we didn’t understand the mechanism for those foods making us sick.
Kosher laws for example likely developed as a means of healthy eating before the advent of refrigeration. Keeping dairy and meat products separate, and forbidding the eating of pork and shellfish which ‘live in filth’ and are prone to bacteria and parasites.
Another example is food preservation in general. Humans have pickled, salted, smoked, and dried food to preserve it since antiquity. They understood this made food last longer and prevented rot, but they didn’t understand that this killed bacteria.
I would consider some traditions like eating kosher to be akin to recognizing germs. They didn’t have the ability to make glass fine enough for microscopes to see the actual germs but they knew eating certain things were dangerous and they acted accordingly.
Just because you know something to be true does not tell you **why** it is true.
People knew left handed people existed. They thought it was the devil’s work.
You know the sun will rise without having to know why.
Same with the cooking. If all the old people in your tribe eat their meat cooked, maybe the secret to living longer is cooked meat. You don’t have to know why.
Also meat cooking was as much about parasites and nutritional availability as it was bacteria.
Because prior to the ability to actively see cells and then further experiments in the 1600s and 1700s to most people it would seem like a leap in logic that small creatures are causing food to smell rotten. Things just became rotten over time because that was in their nature to.
Also, the belief that bad smells caused things to rot was strong. If you lived a millennium ago it would be easy to believe that the smell of a rotting piece caused another piece of food to go bad because it also started to smell. And if you ate a foul smelling piece of food you might also start smelling bad.
I took a few Bio and Anthro classes in college.
There hasn’t been concrete evidence on WHY cave mans cook food, or why the first humans decided to cook food.
It was theorized that it is all coincidental. As in, a random fire just happened to heat up a piece of meat and some caveman really wanted to eat it regardless.
But we do believe humans, or cave mans have evolved to be thinkers and our brains has evolved to be more powerful because of calorie dense food, AKA meat. Our brain uses about 20% of all the calories we intake. We do believe this has to do with fire, and raw food being a combination, and a pure coincidence that we are so intelligent.
Few different things there, cooking food doesn’t just kill germs or toxins but actually made it easier for nu’s to digest.
As for the delay in discovering germ theory, you have to understand science as we know it is only a few centuries old. So the idea of tiny living creatures smaller than the eye can see would be pretty novel.
Superstition influenced early humanity, so instead of microbes, you probably got sick after eating raw pork because God is punishing you for associating with filthy animals.
Then you had “naturalist” answers, you know the smart thinkers, who thought about cause and effect. These people observed their world and used their understanding to make sense of things. So maybe raw meat is poisonous, and cooking it neutralizes the poison. So you start roasting your captured birds, and lo and behold no one gets sick, looks like you solved that issue!
And when someone asks the wise guru why cooking chicken makes it safe to eat, the wise one says “cooking removes the poison!” And then future wise gurus observe the same thing and figure that makes sense so it becomes the widespread truth.
Then “medical science” springboards from there, so we start looking at health from a perspective of balancing the humors in the body, you know, after all we can tell alot about our health from the colour of our blood, mucous, vomit, and shit. And that kind of answers a bunch of questions, eating raw chicken makes the shit wrong, so we need to rebalance the body, bit cooking the chicken means the shit and bile is normal, so there must be something in the raw chicken thst is lost when it is cooked, and that must be the source if ombalancing the liquids. Remember, there was a tike letting leaches drink your blood was good for you! Remember, evolution is sometimes just looking for “good enough”, so sure maybe there were some logical leaps to make drilling a hole in your head make sense, it still kinda provided an answer.
And then someone noticed something, dirty wounds get infected, but cleaned wounds don’t, ah the dirt must be affecting the blood resulting in an imbalance of the humors again, get the leaches!
But what about dirty wounds sours the blood? Tiny Tiny creatures eating and shitting, invisible to the eye, that make no sound? Absurd, until one day understanding changes, someone gets a new perspective and suddenly the tiny tiny creatures are seen, and thst clears up a bunch if questions.
Even today WITH Germ theory, biology, and The Magic School Bus grown adults think rubbing crystals on their body will heal them, or injecting bleach will kill a virus, or maybe a horse dewormer will help you, or maybe you need to add turmeric to your food to fight inflammation or maybe your liver needs a cleanse so you can only eat brocoli for three days. And in some ways, some things are partially right even if only due to the placebo effect, and that is enough for people who know better to ignore the science. So is it any surprise our ancestors were just as susceptible to miscomprehension?
Check out the laws of Kashrut (Kosher foods).
It teaches people not to eat omnivores or carnivores; to wash food; and to oversee food production. As we now know, this regulation helped early semitic cultures avoid food-borne illnesses, especially those found in predatory animals.
Through a couple thousand years, these theistic laws were formed off of trial-and-error. They didn’t understand *why* staying Kosher was healthier–it just was.
Fire didn’t kill the germs, it made food easier to digest and more nutritious. This both gave humans more time in the day and also allowed us to divert more resources to our brain.
This is something we gradually figured out from well… someone tried it and it worked and well the tribe that has extra hours and way more nutrition will out compete all other tribes.
Additionally, as we have cooked we have evolved away from uncooked food.
So it had nothing to do with germs.
That being said we did kinda figure out stuff. So the reason beer was so popular in Europe… was well it’s boiled… meaning water down beer was better for you then water that potentially contaminate for example.
People did figure out some healthcare practices but well understanding you were fighting microscopic organisms took awhile
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