Polahi tribe and some historical commentary

This Indonesian tribe, might be the most interesting place to look at from a genetic point of view,

This tribe, actually have their sons and mothers, daughters and fathers, and half-siblings too, marry each other and breed, for generations, so long they forgot. Could be 100 years, probably more.

They're Buddhist, maybe eat some rice, most probably some vegetables and local tubercles. I wish I knew. They look a lot like this (another Polahi tribe):

What's more ? They're apparently, quite healthy !

No two-headed babies or mutants of any kind.

The question of how this taboo happened is not quite clear, but it's a structural, non accidental process, seeing how it happened independently, God knows how many times over.

I would tend to think it's part and parcel of patriarchal societies, women becoming an object of exchange between tribes, a token of power, as in having the most fertile girls would give the most workers and fighters. Though like everything humans, there are exceptions, and I have no problems imagining a society where men are the most politically adept, yet women would do as they please. Best example of the best of the two worlds : Spartans.

But, in a context where chiefs would be power stupid and hungry (clearly not the case for Spartans and Egyptians), women sticking to their own blood would not go along with their desire for supremacy or intent to profit off their "reproductive value" for services, goods, or even keep them for himself. In that particular way, incest is a pretty good natural equalizer between commoners and the upper class, when it comes to the sexual market, even-though I don't like this notion.

In a more "meta" way, the Marquis de Sade (Divin Marquis !) said, that regulation actually came from the masses, weak people using the power of the laws to wanting to suppress the power of a single House, who would naturally build on their wealth (avoiding dilapidating it) as well as natural, genetic qualities (the actual nobility), increasing the gap even more.

He didn't say it, but I would presume it would take place when the masses already the lost the sense of what is sacred and holy, otherwise just about everyone would do just that, and power or wealth would even out quickly.

Though quite "meta" this idea certainly fit well with Church regulations starting to kick in the 8-9e century (if memory serves me well), while until then keeping it in the clan was the (documented) way to strengthen a House's local power, and avoid dilapidating wealth. Mostly cousins marriages. While exogamy would form alliances and extend this influence, though weakening it as well. Hence, even before Christianism, there was indeed an appeal to exogamy too, look no further thant at Romans.

But I means I'm pretty sure than the further you go back in time, the closer family bounds would be, as the appeal of extending your social circle would be less important, in a much less "complicated" social, civilizational setting, where power would be given to the best and not necessarily the most wealthy or having the most "relations" as of today.

And most likely "fresh" blood would be felt necessary only once in a few generations only, though, once your "group" grew big enough, you would have quite the choice to pick from anyway.

 

Of course, royals would still do that despite regulations, through recurring criss-crossed weirder cousin marriages, leading to some aberrations everyone think of when hearing "incest". But then, it was only for "political power" and didn't filter at all the products of these (forced !) unions. They would not remove the failures from the genepool.

While in the people, most of consanguinamory cases would be kept secret, maybe not so much by guilt, as much by a common agreement that such things are more beautiful and wholesome, when unsullied by popular or religious condemnation. But I guess, it's a matter of perspective.

And there is, of course, the most important reason why any and all taboos appear in the first place: a people that fell out of grace (lacking the sensibility to see greatness and holiness where it lies), in the end, can not tolerate those who still manage to keep even a splinter of light as that would illuminate their own failures as human beings, own sadness and disgrace. All the other explanations, are just side-effects of this fundamentally, or rotten, degenerate attitude.
If you have to grow and have a state, something "modern", or more or less so, what forces you to sell your daughter ? What forces you to use any possible means to heighten your power ?
Why, instead of bribing with women other potentates of power into supporting you, can't you rely on your own natural charisma and abilities ?
What forces you to not do the good thing, in any situation whatsoever ?
Wickedness and weakness. A Spartan king didn't have to force his subject to abide by his rule, nor needed to marry outside to consolidate his power. Nor would Spartan males bind their women in fear they would overthrow them or whatnot. Their virility would not care for any of that, as it was solid and genuine, not unsecure and in constant need of reasserting.

Hence, all taboos and all evil came from weakness, which came from cooking and then, all the shitty systems were built upon to justify evil.

The origin of cooking and our use of fire

This article is dedicated to the arduous task of determining the historical origins of cooking food and what fire was mainly used for.

The official explanation

In 1995, the British primatologist Richard Wrangham formalized what everyone in palaeontology and anthropology, not to mention the general public, had thought for a long time, namely the hypothesis that the reduction of the jaw and the size of the teeth accompanying the growth of the brain in Homo Erectus and the species that followed it would not have been possible without an early mastery of fire allowing the cooking of food.

Thus cooking, by outsourcing part of our digestion, would have allowed us to waste less time and energy eating, devoting these resources to developing our brain and properly human symbolic activities. But this thesis dates the mastery of fire to nearly two million years ago, whereas the certain habitual use of fire in households dates, for most specialists, to 500,000 years at most... as reported for the Qesem cave  which associates the earliest control of fire mainly with the first Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.

"With an enormous jaw comparable to that of a chimpanzee, pre-humans found an energy balance by devoting only a small part of their time to efficient chewing of raw food," summarizes Mr Hladik. Without cooking, which makes food more chewable and digestible, the reduction in dentition, and therefore the increase in the size of the skull of our ancestors, could not have occurred.”

Au vu de ses thèses extensives cet auteur (Wrangham) représente la quintessence de la sottise anthropologique actuelle dans toute sa splendeur. Je pourrais bien revoir un certain nombre de ses livres bourrés de jugements biaisées basés sur des postulats faux mais rassurants pour les gens. Ce n'est pas une vendetta... mais une question de justice intellectuel.

In view of his extensive theses, this author (Wrangham) represents the quintessence of current anthropological silliness in all its splendor. I could well review a number of his books full of biased judgments based on false but reassuring assumptions. This is not a vendetta... but a matter of intellectual justice.

In 2012, microstratigraphic evidence (based on microscopic analysis of sedimentary layers, looking for chemical or isotopic traces) of the earliest fire use by hominids in situ one million years ago in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape Province, South Africa, arrived. 

This is considered unequivocal evidence for the habitual use of fire by Homo Erectus.

Does this mean that cooking is a million years old? No.

Cooking to eat meat ?

The idea that cooking is necessary for the digestion of raw meat comes from the representation of the fresh leg with the consistency of rubber. In reality, raw meat is edible - and much better digested than cooked - but only when left to age a significant time.

In nature, monkeys are not carnivores like lions or dogs, jumping on the prey and devouring it almost alive, fresh. Eating fresh meat is not strictly impossible (especially entrails and brain). But we observe that all populations consuming raw meat prefer old and matured by far. Ex: "Inuits".

"Some people put meat and fat in a plastic garbage bag, to quickly obtain the fermentation that traditionally occurs in a bag through the skin of the sewn animal. The meat is also placed in a large plastic tub with a lid, which is then kept warm in the kitchen," wrote Roué in 1996.

The maturation of the products (meat or fruit) is typically separated into autolysis and faisandage (or rotting for fruit). Aseptic autolysis is the degradation of membranes and cell walls by apoptosis (programmed cell death), without the action of bacteria. The rotting or ripening corresponds to degradation by bacteria.

In fact, the processes are not totally distinct but overlap and intertwine, especially for animals.

The online encyclopedia "Gastronomiac" defines pheasantage as follows

"Operation consisting in leaving a game animal in a cool place for a variable time (up to 8 days, and even more for some amateurs) in order to tenderize its flesh and to obtain a particular flavour under the effect of the mortification. This fumet is produced by germs in the intestine, which invade the tissues and break down the proteins, generating substances that, in the long run, become toxic.

Mushrooms are also involved in the practice of dry curing, where they form a kind of hard green crust on the outside of the piece of meat: they actually help the enzymes to tenderize and add flavor. This crust is then removed.

Nowadays, we no longer push pheasantry to the point of "altering the smell" as Montagne recommended in the 16th century, until the 19th century when Brillat-Savarin, inventor of the eponymous cheese, is said to have said that he "bothered all his colleagues by the smell of the game he brought in his pockets to have it ripen".

This is pretty much impossible today and perhaps not without reason:

→ Foreigners eating for the first time in developing countries get "turista", an explosive intestinal reaction to "hygienic" conditions that are inferior to ours.

→ The disturbed intestinal flora takes a few days to renew itself.

We live in almost total asepsis compared to poor countries. Children in India live in slums for years... And even epidemics having long since disappeared from Europe. The immune resistance of those exposed to various germs throughout their lives far exceeds ours.

Westerners live permanently under medical perfusion, without which infant mortality would immediately skyrocket and life expectancy would drop to 40 years.

Apes hunt incidentally, but neither dentition nor digestive system facilitate fresh meat.

For tens of millions of years - before the brain developed sufficiently - primates remained casual and opportunistic meat eaters, so it is quite logical that we have adapted to carcasses found in the wild, quickly emitting a strong and attractive odor in a humid and hot tropical climate.

Even dogs have the habit of digging in the ground to bury their game.

So we have all the enzymes we need to digest raw meat, but we have to let our friends the microbes do their job. So if prehistoric man used fire but did not cook, what did he do with it?

Several hypotheses can be put forward :

- scare the animals at night to sleep in peace (especially since we don't sleep in trees anymore)

- to light up

- to keep warm

- to make tools.

- cereals

Fire to scare animals

Most people, including scientists, think that fire scares animals instinctively... This is FALSE.

Try it in the African savannah and tomorrow you will be missing a few toes, with the certainty of having caused a nice indigestion to a lioness or hyena: they are intelligent and not afraid. They avoid and know the danger of fire but their behavior is not irrational: if the fire is not too big or too fast, there is no need to worry. The same goes for wolves and bears.

Most animals flee from men, and it is proven that it is not the fire but the human presence behind the fire that discourages...

Some, on the contrary, are attracted by the smell of cooked food and therefore by the fire, and come to help themselves. Habit plays a role: they will come all the more by associating the human presence with food, the fire will indicate the human presence, and the cooked smells have the same fascination on animals as on us.

We are not natural prey for any animal. Sharks or tigers will only pounce on us if they are hungry... or drugged by denatured molecules. 

The number is enough to discourage predators interested in your children or pets, more than fire can. Finally, fire attracts mosquitoes, and snakes! The whole thing.

Fire for lighting ?

This point is problematic because we lack precise data.

Certainly we did not live very often in caves (which are not perfect places to preserve fossils) but in forests, much less dark. However, it turns out that prehistoric humans, who were only slightly more intelligent than chimpanzees, could live in caves, according to research.

We are not cats: no tapetum lucidum reflecting light behind pupils, moreover they have 150 million beats instead of our 120.

But it is not necessary to hunt in the forest as in the daytime... it is enough to navigate obstacles two or three meters around you in the dark.

There is also a special training for night vision (scotopic), well studied during 2GM.

Finally we can attest that burned bones become fluorescent, and effective to illuminate the cellars, we have experienced. So finding remains of burned bones does not necessarily mean that they were thrown into the fire to extract the marrow, as we can read sometimes.

See the article:Krap, T., Busscher, L., Oostra, R. J., Aalders, M. C. G., & Duijst, W. (2021). Phosphorescence of thermally altered human bone. International Journal of Legal Medicine, 135(3), 1025–1034. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-020-02455-1

In summary, it is difficult to conclude on the quality of our ancestors' vision. But insofar as the African forest is not clearer than ours in the middle of the night, and that many primates live in similar latitudes to ours, there is no real reason to think that it was a problem before. Our adaptive capacities are very high, so witnesses have noticed more than once the excellent night vision (compared to themselves, not to cats of course) of wild children.

Heating oursleves

Did primitive man need fire to heat himself? In tropical countries, absolutely not, it is rather too hot and I sometimes regret with bitterness not being able to tear off my skin, once already naked...

What about a continental climate? It is true that unlike macaques we lost our fur a long time ago. However in Aveyron it is 20° in August, and 5 in November and our Victor naked as a worm, even if unlike other wild children several times came to take refuge in houses, was all the same said insensitive hot and cold.

Even more convincing: meet Wim Hof, or "Ice Man".

"I am able to control the body only through the power of the mind," said Hof, who calls himself the "Iceman." "The cold is unforgiving. It shows you where you are. What you are."

In 2002, he stayed 6 min 20 s in apnea under the polar ice.

The ultimate test for Hof was an Arctic half-marathon (21 km). He will have to fight against the prolonged effects of exposure to the cold (average of -20°C). Experts estimated that a normal person would not last 15 minutes running in such conditions. 

At first, Hof ran at a steady, consistent pace. But halfway through, he began to falter. After three hours of exposure to the icy conditions, Hof's mental powers began to fade.

 

After five hours, Hof could no longer run. But his slowness increased the risk of cold damage.

 

 

On January 26, 2008, in New York, he stayed 72 minutes in a translucent container filled with ice, breaking his 2004 record of 68 minutes.

In the spring of 2007, Wim Hof undertook the ascent of Everest with minimal technical equipment to resist the cold. For his equipment, Wim Hof was provided with shorts, gloves and a cap, but had to stop at 7400 m, because of a foot injury from the half marathon in January.

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A capacity of thermogenesis far superior to what most people have access to, because denatured molecules disturb thermoregulation enormously: we observe with raw food and even more so with instincto a huge improvement at this level, and the resurgence of sensitivity to cold can most of the time be correlated to elimination outflows, identifiable a generalized weakness and other symptoms such as stinky stools, in particular emitting typical odors, typical aromatic molecules of cooked dishes, obviously not coming from our diet... they are therefore stored for years in the heart of our cells, until a favorable supply and conditions allow their exchange and exit, causing characteristic disorders in the process.

And many monks develop similar abilities in Tibet through concentration and training, which is now being studied in the laboratory under controlled conditions. It is hard to guess what such adaptability could have been used for by African monkeys, or even Neanderthals. But we can safely assume that at no time did our ancestors need fire as long as they stayed where there was food to eat, which in any case excludes the Arctic Circle. Even so, clothing (animal skins) provided more than adequate protection and one could survive on meat, fish, seafood and dried fruit reserves for quite a long time.

Technology

Determining the intelligence of Homo Erectus is difficult because even if the brain (546 to 1251 cm³) is notoriously smaller than ours (1200-1500) Anatole France, a writer and moral authority of the first order in the 19th century recognized by a Marcel Proust, had a brain of around 1 kg, so not more than 1000 cm³ given the density of the brain. 

The more evolved populations like the Neanderthals had an obvious mastery of fire, allowing them to produce tar.

We believe that the potential of our brain is largely under-utilized, because we have evolved to function mainly on the basis of the extrasensory, and this is virtually absent, leaving only the organic carcass and a powerful organic computer, but neither the hardware nor the operating system is designed to imitate Big Blue! We will come back to this.

In any case, the understanding of fire does not imply cooking at all, and I think it predicts a good five hundred thousand years at least, if not much more because some bonobos (morphologically identical to the others) are very close to mastering fire, which means that they all are.

The first granaries date back to 11,000 BC: https://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10966, which corresponds to the beginning of agriculture as taught. The consumption of cereals is of course older. I am of the opinion that cooking must have appeared at several times in several places, more or less accidentally, because consequent control and taking thousands of years to develop, allowed sufficient food security to concentrate populations in sedentary centers, contrary to what has always been the case.

The majority of tuberous vegetables such as manioc are absolutely impossible to eat raw, as are grasses in general, with the exception of corn. Their place in the current diet is explained by the opiates contained, and their addictive effect.

But groups falling under this lack of insitnctive programming against the product of our own intelligence, have quickly degenerated physically, then devoured by predators also fascinated, or supplanted by other animal or human species.

Cereals

One paper may point to an early, if ephemeral, establishment of cooking and grain (J. Mercader, Mozambican Grass Seed Consumption During the Middle Stone Age, 2009). Cereal remains were found in Mozambique, forming a patina on stone tools associated with millstones and pestles dating back to 100,000 years ago. 80% of the seed remains were from a wild sorghum species, indicating an organized enterprise.

I would gladly wait a few years to draw conclusions, and if it is indeed a question of cooking and cereals - which I am not certain of - this use has obviously not lasted. That the use was technical and not food is also not absolutely ruled out.

By the way, it is possible that the cooked food fascinated relatively primitive populations at the level of analytical intelligence, i.e. incapable of foreseeing or even conceiving the possible consequences, since a certain size of the brain has been reached, let's say, 800 cm³.

But these groups falling under the blow of this lack of insitnctive programming against the product of our own intelligence, quickly had to degenerate physically, then devoured by predators fascinated too, or supplanted by other animal or human species.

After all, it was still customary in ancient Greece, though relatively cultured, to eliminate immediately at birth monsters and mutants, any "abnormal" child. Many animals also have the impulse to reject abnormal individuals from the herd, and mothers to kill such defective offspring.

Cooked meat

And then around 50,000 BC, cooking would have seen a sustained and definitive development, as proven by the unrestrained consumption of meat which decimated the megafauna all over Europe: certainly the Neanderthals still consumed (some) mammoths, but we begin to observe a drastic reduction of the fauna all over the continent, which from then on will systematically accompany any human migration, on all continents or islands (be careful, the scale is logarithmic). Which makes me think, that cooking became around that time a world fact.

The consumption of cooked meat is fascinating, and this has led to an explosion of meat consumption at the expense of other food sources. Thus with cooked meat one quickly loses interest in insects, wild fruits and even fish. This was followed by a loss of interest in the forests: soon people stopped living in them, in harmony with their environment, but settled in villages, even before agriculture. During the Bronze Age (3000 BC) the European populations still kept a predominantly hunter-gatherer way of life, yet the European megafauna was already gone.

The extinction of the megafauna (Holocene extinction) has been and still is blamed on climate change, but this makes no sense: the climate cycles, alternating ice ages and interglacials, were what they were for 1.7 million years.

Let's keep in mind that an ice age and the growth of glaciers over part of Europe does not mean sub-zero temperatures all year round. A cooler summer of 1 or 2 degrees is enough for the ice not to melt entirely, but to accumulate, producing glaciers.

We can see that it is not logical that the last glacier minimum could have decimated large mammals. The use of the fire, was necessary and indispensable for this killing, because it is impossible to stuff raw meat so if it is wild: the instinct prevents such abuse. Without this being a justification for the necessity of fire, in any case the disappearance of the megafauna can be considered an irrefutable paleontological marker.

Conclusion

The mystery question is: why around -50 000, all of a sudden, did the baked food conquer the planet? It doesn't seem to be possible to answer scientifically. I will give a more speculative answer later.

But once it started it is not hard to understand how it continued: a bottomless pit effect, which condemns to more cooking once you fall into it, because unselected raw products are easily inedible and produce incomprehensible and uncontrollable reactions, pushing to a more and more complex cooking up to the hyper-industrial foods of today.

So the tribe that started it all was able to transmit the cooked disease culturally.

Cooking increases fertility at all levels (but shortens it in time on the other hand), I and Guy-Claude will come back to this. It is enough to consider that from a certain population threshold the cooked groups could have simply replaced largely the others, or absorbed them.

We see around -50,000 years changes in the European racial morphology, which marked overall transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic, with unprecedented genetic and anatomical degeneration that will be the subject of another video. The reduction of the brain size since the Paleolithic, now proven, we believe, could only come from self-domestication (concomitant with the consumption of cereals and sedentarization) and cooking that preceded and made it possible.

That's it for the origin of cooking. I hope you will have enjoyed it.