Cooking, Evolution, and Brain Growth Anthropology STEM Education 

Cooking, Evolution, and Brain Growth

Cooking establishes the difference between animals and people. In fact, we’re not the only social animals that sit down to eat together, but we are the only ones who cook. But how is cooking linked to human brain’s growth and evolution? This is a video from Dr. Joe Hanson’s It’s Okay To Be Smart series. Cooking helped humans strengthen social bonds and cooperation. Although our brain uses one-fifth of the calories that we eat, we spend only 5 percent of our daily lives eating, while Chimpanzees and Gorillas spend more than half…

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A woman in the village of Karech, in rural India, prepares a meal on a traditional three-stone hearth. Courtesy of H.S. Udaykumar and University of Iowa Environment Health 

Small Metal Stove Grate Makes Big Impact

An inexpensive metal stove grate insert for primitive cookstoves, created by a University of Iowa research team, may decrease global warming and potentially save many lives. By Kate Stone The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 2.7 billion people worldwide still rely on wood fires to cook their food, and more than 4 million die each year from illnesses connected to household air pollution caused by that method of cooking. The insert decreases wood consumption by about 60 percent, and further testing  conducted in a national lab in India found…

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