Richard Wrangham has tasted just about everything that chimpanzees eat in Africa and once considered seeing if he could live on that diet. “I realized I’d be pretty hungry,” Wrangham said. “It would be difficult for a human to survive on a chimpanzee’s diet.” The signature of the human diet is cooking, he said on Thursday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. By changing the forms of starches, fats and proteins, cooking concentrates the nutrients in foods, he told a panel on the dietary habits of early humans. Lined up along the table was a series of ancient...
photo: WN/Theresa
