Educação pode mudar sua vida

(Note: The most commonly used recent definition of “hominin": the group consisting of modern humans, extinct human species and all our immediate ancestors, including members of the genera Homo, Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Ardipithecus.)

¹Cooking is fundamental to human nutrition, and it is a truly ancient practice that was pivotal in the evolution of humans. The idea that cooking makes us human is an old one. In 1785 the Scottish biographer and diarist James Boswell wrote: "My Definition of Man, is a 'Cooking Animal.' The beasts have memory, judgment, and the faculties and passions of our mind, in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook..." Boswell was writing before Darwin, and so he was not making an evolutionary argument, but the idea that cooking is fundamental to our species is a conclusion that others have also felt in their very guts [ospróprios intestinos] to be right. Gut instinct [intuição] is generally frowned upon [pouco aceitável] as a source of evidence in science, but guts are key witnesses in this matter.
²Since no beast is a cook and, as Boswell said, we are cooking animals, the obvious question is, how and when did this habit evolve? Our great ape [grande slmio] cousins are essentially vegetarians, living on leaves and fruits. Gorillaseat only plants, but chimpanzees will catch and eat animals when they can, though this is opportunistic behavior and they live mainly on fruit. Chimps can't cook, even though it has been argued that they are intelligent enough for the task. The common ancestor of chimps and ourselves must have been a vegetarian, and so we meat-eating, cooking humans evolved by stages from vegetarian, indeed vegan [urn vegetarianoquecomesomenteprodutosdeplantas], stock [o progenitor original].
³The enormous gulf between ourselves and other animals appears so large-not just in diet and cooking, butalsoin intelligence, language, brain size, and anatomy - because the intermediates along the evolutionary pathway that we unwittingly [sem saber] followed have been erased by extinction.
⁴Vegetarians leave little behind in the paleoarchaeological record to show what they ate - or rather, what they leave behind is very little. The characteristic shapes of very tiny grains of silica called phytoliths- which are part of the structure of leaves and when eaten can become lodged [presos] in teeth - can tell us something about what kind of plants were eaten by, say, Lucy, the 3.18 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensislound in 1974 by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in the desert of Hadar in Ethiopia. The diet of Lucy and her kind [espdcie], though mainly vegetarian, included a wider range of plants than is eaten by chimps, and it seems that Australopithecus, of which there are several species, were in general adapted to live in a wider range of environments than chimps do. A alarensis had larger molars, smaller canine teeth, and more powerful jaws than a chimp, suggesting that this ancestor did a great deal of chewing of tough food. The scientific consensus is that our own genus, Homo, arose from a species of Australopithecus, probably Lucy's own A alarensis, which lived 3.8-2.95 million years ago.
⁵ In any event, the answer to exactly when cooking began is likely to become clearer as more fossil and paleoarchaeological evidence is discovered. By comparison with the mystery of when cooking began, the question of why has a much clearer answer. Cooking increases the digestibility of food, enabling us to extract more energy from it, and it inactivates many toxins, incidentally, opening new vistas of possibility in hominin evolution. Perhaps the most persuasive evidence that we are truly the cooking animal is that brain growth and cooking do seem inextricably linked. During the evolution of humans, our guts shrank at around the same time that our brains grew. Large, smart brains unlocked the possibility of uniquely human capabilities such as complex language, abstract thinking, and all that flowed from that. Brains are very energy-hungry organs. The human brain is only about 2 percent of body weight but uses fully 20 percent of the energy consumed in a resting state.
⁶While our brains are much bigger than the norm for a primate of our size, our guts are much smaller. By economizing on guts, evolution spared energy for splurging [gastar liberalmente] on bigger brains. Studies suggest that by increasing the energy value of our food, cooking made it possible for smaller guts to supply the burgeoning [crescentes] requirements of brain evolution. Our evolutionary history has indeed shaped our dietary capabilities, but it has broadened rather than narrowed them. We have survived and then thrived [florescido], multiplied, and occupied every continent because we are adaptable, intelligent omnivores.