Canibais e Reis

Vídeo: "Guerre du Feu", Jean Jacques-Annaud (1981).

Não é por acaso que os grandes primatas preferem comida cozinhada. Na realidade, o fogo foi e é uma ferramenta essencial para nos propiciar novos tipos de alimentos, e com isso facilitar a evolução e a manutenção do nosso cérebro. Por isso, o crudivorismo representa não só uma regressão evolucionária, mas também a negação de boa parte dos alimentos para os quais o nosso genoma está adaptado, por exemplo as proteínas animais cozinhadas. A respeito da importância do fogo em toda a história e evolução, humana e do planeta, sugere-se a leitura do seguinte artigo:

A burning story: The role of fire in the history of life

The human era: Fire in the preindustrial world

 

Early hominids (genus Homo) appeared in eastern Africa about 2.5 mya, and fire has been closely integrated into many stages of their evolution. It is believed that the rise of Homo erectus from its more primitive ancestors was fueled by the ability to cook—that is, to use fire (Wrangham et al. 1999). Indeed, recent studies demonstrate a preference by nonhuman primates for cooked food (Wobber et al. 2008). The higher food energy that cooking supplies, as well as the detoxifying effects of heating (which increased the diversity of available food), contributed to a fitness advantage in these early humans. Furthermore, cooking implied a delay in food consumption, which required the development of social abilities for the distribution of tasks within the group (e.g., collection, accumulation, cooking, defense, even stealing), as well as the socializing effect of gathering around nighttime campfires (Pyne 1995). These factors are thought to have prompted the evolution of large brains and bodies, small teeth, modern limb proportions, and other human traits, including many social aspects of human-associated behavior (Wrangham et al.1999). Indeed, by softening food, fire could have had a large effect on extending the human life span beyond the age of good-quality teeth. This may have been very significant in social organization, including the “grandmother” hypothesis relating child care with social development and human evolution (Hawkes 2004). These early hominids spread out of Africa, distributing their available fire technology; indeed, fire promoted the dispersal of humans by allowing them to colonize colder environments and by protecting them from predators. There is evidence of the controlled use of fire by Homo erectus in Africa (clusters of ancient hearths) during the Lower Pleistocene (James 1989), about 1.5 mya. The earliest non controversial evidence out of Africa is from the Near East during the Early-Middle Pleistocene (0.79 mya; Goren-Inbar et al. 2004). The detailed analysis of this archaeological site from the Near East demonstrates that fire was used throughout the occupational sequence (about 100,000 years), suggesting that the knowledge these hominids had of fire making enabled them to set fire at will and in diverse environmental settings (Alperson 2008). During the Paleolithic and Mesolithic ages, fire was used extensively for what has been termed “fire-stick farming” (Bird et al. 2008). This term implies using fire for a variety of reasons: clearing ground for human habitats, facilitating travel, killing vermin, hunting, regenerating plant food sources for both humans and livestock, and even warfare among tribes. These land-management practices had profound impacts not only on fire regimes but also on the landscape vegetation pattern and biodiversity. Commonly, woody, closed-canopy shrublands and woodlands were opened up or entirely displaced by fast-growing annual species that provide greater seed resources, travel, and hunting and planting opportunities. These changes also had cascading effects on ecosystem function. For instance, fire-stick farming by Australian Aborigines created fine-grained landscape mosaics with greater small-animal diversity and increased hunting productivity (Bird et al. 2008). In mediterranean-climate California, where agriculture failed to develop until European colonization, use of fire was extensive and is thought to have created a disequilibrium that contributed to rapid alien plant colonization when Europeans arrived (Keeley 2002). This reshaping of landscapes has posed problems for ecologists trying to understand contemporary landscape patterns.The spread of humans, perhaps concomitant with climatic changes, contributed to the mass disappearance of mega fauna such as mammoths and other large herbivores (i.e., the Pleistocene-Holocene extinction; Burney and Flannery 2005); this extinction would also have resulted in fuel buildup and the consequent change in fire activity, as suggested by the contemporary effects of mega herbivores. In fact, fire-stick farming was probably necessary after the megafauna extinction, not only to open up closed-canopy woodlands to create habitable environments but also to reduce catastrophic fires that would pose a risk to humans (Burney and Flannery2005), and to increase seed resources needed as humans were forced to switch to a less meat-dependent diet. Although massive wildfires caused by an extraterrestrial impact have been hypothesized to have played a key role in the late Pleistocene megafauna demise in North America (Firestoneet al. 2007), this view has been disputed by Pinter and Ishman (2008), who contend that human involvement is a much more likely source of massive fires at this time.The Neolithic agricultural revolution required fire to alter the natural vegetation from perennial-dominated to annual-dominated landscapes. It has been postulated that people referred to live in fire-prone places because the burning provided them advantages for hunting, foraging, cultivating, and livestock herding (Pyne 1995). Even today, many agricultural and forestry techniques require fire (e.g., slash-and-burn agriculture). Charcoal evidence suggests monotonic increases of biomass burning from the last glacial maximum(about 21,000 years BP) up to the start of the agricultural stage(about 10,000 year BP; figure 3), and this trend is linked to climatic warming and the expansion of terrestrial vegetation as a result of the waning of ice sheets (Power et al. 2008).This upward tendency in global fire activity was halted with the rise of agriculture, although a marked regional variation in charcoal accumulation has been observed for this period.With increasing human population throughout history, agriculture has expanded and modified many landscapes. During the latter part of human history, growing populations have tended to limit fuels on many landscapes and to disrupt fuel continuity because of the effects of the combination of agriculture and livestock farming. The increase in human populations concomitant with the Holocene drying has raised a debate about whether major modifications to vegetation in the last 6000 to 7000 years are more the result of human activities than they are of climatic changes. Similarly, it is often difficult to distinguish between ignitions arising from humans versus natural lighting sources in Holocene fire-regime changes. How landscapes might have looked without any human impact is very difficult, if not impossible, to know, because human presence on the landscape predates contemporary vegetation and climate; the rise in human civilization occurred simultaneously with Holocene warming, and both climate-driven and human-driven changes have shaped our current landscape. At the global scale, both climatic and anthropogenic factors are needed to explain variations in global biomass burning over the last two millennia (Marlon et al. 2008).The decline in charcoal sediment from 1 AD to approximately 1750 AD is attributed to global cooling, with its lowest biomass burning during the Little Ice Age (1400–1800AD), plus the increased land area dedicated to agriculture;however, the sharp increase afterward can be explained only by exponential increases in world population growth and ignitions (Marlon et al. 2008). Temporal scales also alter the relative importance of human versus climatic effects on fire regimes. For example, population density and fire are related in pre-Columbian American Societies (table 1; Delcourt and Delcourt 1997, Keeley 2002),and in the last 500 years, in Patagonia, climatic influences of fire regime are significant on a short-term basis (annual variability), but the role of humans emerges when examined over decades and centuries (Veblen et al. 1999). What is clear is that humans have affected fire regimes for millennia, and changes in human societies (e.g., from native to Europeans,from preindustrial to postindustrial, etc.) signify changes in fire regimes. Indeed, in temperate ecosystems, there are clear and consistent fire-regime changes as hunting and gathering societies move to agricultural-grazing societies and then to industrial societies (table 1), although these changes may have occurred at different times in different parts of the world (Covington and Moore 1994, Allen et al. 2002, Guyetteet al. 2002, Keeley 2002, Pausas 2004, Nowacki and Abrams2008).
 

Fonte: Pausas J.G. & Keeley J.E. 2009. A burning story:
The role of fire in the history of life. BioScience 59 (7).