On the Origin of Seafood by Means of Natural Selection,

Or the Preparation of Favorite Dishes in the Struggle for Dinner.

567 – 537 million years ago

The Cambrian explosion — shells and skeletons, and all the major animal phyla of today — is one of the major events in the history of life. It’s hard to miss – Darwin was well aware of it – because for the first time you have abundant well-preserved fossils of animals with hard parts. From now on, if I miss a tweet one day or another, it’s because I didn’t get to it, not because the evidence isn’t there.

Genetic evidence seemingly clashes with the fossil evidence. A “molecular clock” based on rates of gene divergence suggests that major animal phyla had begun diverging from one another long before the Cambrian explosion. But maybe the genetic evidence is wrong, and the “molecular clock” was running faster in the past than more recently. Or maybe complex organisms evolved long before the Cambrian, but left little or no fossil evidence. Or maybe the ancestors of today’s animals really did diverge early, but didn’t get complex until the Cambrian.

And why the explosion happened when it did is unresolved. Here’s a recent review. The early Snowball Earth episodes probably contributed in some way, and the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere must have been important. Or maybe there was some dramatic biological event that triggered the explosion: the origin of eyes, and/or the beginning of predation, setting off an arms race between predators and prey that’s been going on ever since.

If this last possibility is correct, then the transition from an Edenic, predator-free Ediacaran world to the Cambrian is a form of “symmetry breaking.” There is maybe an analogy here in human social evolution to the transition from an egalitarian society to a world of inequality, of rulers and ruled  (which also followed a – much milder – glacial episode).

Speaking of predation: the Logarithmic History blog is partly about commemorating great events in the past. It seems fitting to celebrate the Cambrian as the origin of seafood. If you take your time machine back to any time before the Cambrian, pickings will be slim – algae mostly, although we don’t really know what the Ediacara would have tasted like. The time-traveller’s menu gets a lot better with the Cambrian (although wood for a fire is still a problem). Nowadays you can’t hope to dine on trilobite, alas. (Check out March 13 last year for more of this sad story.) But sometime in the next few days why not have some mussels for dinner? (The recipe below has some non-Cambrian ingredients. It will be a few more days, incidentally, before the evolution of anything kosher.)

Steamed mussels, 4 servings

Wash and debeard:
4 to 6 pounds mussels
Place them in a large pot and add:
½ cup dry white wine
½ cup minced fresh parsley or other herbs
2 tablespoons chopped garlic
Cover the pot, place it over high heat, and cook, shaking the pot occasionally, until most of the mussels are opened, about 10 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to remove mussels to a serving bowl, then strain the cooking liquid over them. Drizzle over the mussels:
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
Juice of 1 lemon
Serve with:
Plenty of crusty bread (invented< 15,000 years ago, but who’s counting?)

Quest for fire, or, Eisenhower steak

833 – 789 thousand years ago

This post, and some subsequent tweets, are a few days late. I was touring wineries in the Sunnyslope region of Idaho, a little ways outside Boise. Recommended, if you get a chance; you could pick up some wines that would pair well with Eisenhower steak (recipe below).

On June 3 on Logarithmic History, our ancestors had gotten as far as steak tartare. Now it’s time for an Eisenhower steak (cooked directly on the coals; see below).

What really distinguishes humans from other animals? We’ve covered some of the answers already, and will cover more in posts to come. But certainly one of the great human distinctions is that we alone use fire. Fire is recognized as something special not just by scientists, but in the many myths about how humans acquired fire. (It ain’t just Prometheus.) Claude Lévi-Strauss got a whole book out of analyzing South American Indian myths of how the distinction between raw and cooked separates nature from culture. (I admit this is where I get bogged down on Lévi-Strauss.)

Until recently the story about fire was that it came late, toward the latter days of Homo erectus. But Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard, turned this around with his book Catching Fire (which is not the same as this book), arguing that the taming of fire goes back much earlier, to the origin of Homo erectus. Wrangham argues that it was cooking in particular that set us on the road to humanity. Cooking allows human beings to extract much more of energy from foods (in addition to killing parasites). Homo erectus had smaller teeth and jaw than earlier hominins and probably a smaller gut, and it may have been fire that made this possible. Cooking is also likely to have affected social life, by focusing eating and socializing around a central place. (E O Wilson thinks that home sites favored intense sociality in both social insects and humans.)

Surviving on raw food is difficult for people in a modern high-tech environment and probably impossible for people in traditional settings. Anthropologists are always looking for human universals, and almost always finding exceptions (e.g. the vast majority of societies avoid regular brother-sister marriage, but there are a few exceptions, including Roman Egypt and Zoroastrian Iran). But cooking seems to be a real, true universal. No society is known where people got by without cooking. Tasmanians, isolated from the rest of the world for 10,000 years, with the simplest technology of any people in recent history, had supposedly lost the art of making fire, but still kept fires going and still cooked.

Recent archeological finds have pushed the date for controlled use of fire back to 1 million years ago, but not all the way back to the origin of Homo erectus. This doesn’t mean Wrangham is wrong. Fire sites don’t always preserve very well: we have virtually no archeological evidence of the first Americans controlling fire, but nobody doubts they were doing it. It could be that it will be the geneticists who will settle this one. The Maillard (or browning) reaction that gives cooked meat much of its flavor generates compounds that are toxic to many mammals but not (or not so much) to us. At some point we may learn just how far back genetic adaptations to eating cooked food go.

An alternative to an early date for fire, there is the recent theory that processing food, by chopping it up and mashing it with stone tools, was the crucial early adaptation.

Whenever it is exactly that humans started cooking, the date falls in (Northern hemisphere) grilling season on Logarithmic History, so you can celebrate the taming of fire accordingly. It doesn’t have to be meat you grill. Some anthropologists think cooking veggies was even more important. I recommend sliced eggplant particularly, brushed with olive oil to keep it from sticking, and with salt, pepper, and any other spices.

On the other hand, Homo erectus probably appreciated a good Eisenhower steak, cooked directly on the coals. (Yes, this actually works pretty well.)

Eisenhower Coal-Fired Steak

Named for the 34th president of the United States, who liked to cook his steaks directly on the coals, this preparation will create a crunchy, charred exterior with rosy, medium-rare meat inside.

Lump hardwood coals work better than briquettes for this recipe because they burn hotter. Be sure you use long-handled tongs. (Sorry, this method is for charcoal or wood grilling only.)

You might find an uneven exterior crust, especially when using lump charcoal, because it is irregularly shaped (unlike the uniform briquette pillows). If that happens, try to position the steak so that it is more directly on the coals and gets an even char. Clasp the steak in the tongs and rap the tongs against the edge of the grill to knock off the occasional clinging ember. If you have some ash, flick it off with a pastry brush.

Make Ahead: The steaks can be seasoned and refrigerated up to 4 hours in advance. Bring them to room temperature before they go on the fire.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• Two 1 1/2-inch-thick boneless rib-eye steaks (about 28 ounces total)
• 2 teaspoons coarse sea salt
• 2 teaspoons freshly cracked black pepper

---

DIRECTIONS

Prepare the grill for direct heat. Light the charcoal; when the coals are just covered in gray ash, distribute them evenly over the cooking area. For a hot fire (450 to 500 degrees), you should be able to hold your hand about 6 inches above the coals for 2 or 3 seconds. Have a spray water bottle at hand for taming any flames. But use it lightly; you don’t want to dampen the heat too much, and some flames here are fine.

Meanwhile, brush the oil on the both sides of the steaks, then season both sides liberally with salt and pepper.

Once the coals are ready, place the steaks directly on the coals (see headnote). Cook, uncovered, for 6 minutes on one side, then use tongs to turn them over. Cook for about 5 minutes on the second side.

Transfer the steaks to a platter to rest for 10 minutes. Serve as is, or cut them into 1/2-inch-thick slices.

Your cuisinart, a prehistory

A famous movie cut, from 2001: A Space Odyssey, transitions from a bone club, hurled aloft by an australopithecine 2.5 million years ago, to a spacecraft in the year 2001.

Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, coming up with the plot for the movie/book, were influenced by the popular author Robert Ardrey. In his book African Genesis, Ardrey casts human evolution as a version of the story of Cain and Abel, except in his version the peaceful vegetarians (robust australopithecines) get clobbered by the club-wielding meat-eaters (gracile australopithecines).

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments?  Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

Ardrey, along with Konrad Lorenz and Desmond Morris, was much in vogue in the 1960s: Sam Peckinpah was another movie director influenced by him. The man could turn a phrase. Unfortunately his speculations on evolution and human behavior are probably not of enduring value: he had the misfortune to take up the topic too early to take on board the sociobiological revolution pioneered by William Hamilton, Robert Trivers, and George Williams, and popularized by E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins.

Ardrey may not have been off-base in thinking that weaponry and warfare have been an important motive force in human biological and social evolution (more on this later). But where early stone tools are concerned, a different segue, from Oldowan chopper to Cuisnart may be more appropriate.

Recent research argues that early hominins could have dramatically increased available food energy by pounding vegetables and chopping up meat into more digestible pieces. Tool use may have been an early step in our ancestors’ move to high energy diets. Meat-eating began to be important in human evolution around 2.6 million years ago. Somewhat later we see evidence that some hominins have lighter jaws and aren’t chewing as much. So to celebrate this early dietary revolution, here’s a recipe:

Steak Tartare

Place in a food processor fitted with the metal chopping blade:

1 ½ pounds lean beef (tenderloin, top round, or sirloin) cut into ½ inch cubes

Pulse until meat is coarsely ground, 7-10 seconds. Do not over-process. Remove meat to a chilled platter or individual plates and gently form into 6 individual mounds.

[Optional: Make a spoon shaped indentation on top of each mound and crack into each

1 egg yolk.]

Divide and arrange in small piles around each serving:

½ cup minced onions
½ cup minced shallots
½ cup minced fresh parsley
¼ cup minced drained capers
8-12 anchovies (optional)

Serve immediately and pass separately:

Fresh lemon juice
Worcestershire sauce
Dijon mustard
Hot pepper sauce
Freshly ground black pepper
Salt

From The Joy of Cooking 1997

On the Origin of Seafood by Means of Natural Selection

Or the Preparation of Favorite Dishes in the Struggle for Dinner.

562-532 million years ago

The Cambrian explosion — shells and skeletons, and all the major animal phyla of today — is one of the major events in the history of life. It’s hard to miss – Darwin was well aware of it – because for the first time you have abundant well-preserved fossils of animals with hard parts. From now on, if I miss a tweet one day or another, it’s because I didn’t get to it, not because the evidence isn’t there.

Genetic evidence seemingly clashes with the fossil evidence. A “molecular clock” based on rates of gene divergence suggests that major animal phyla had begun diverging from one another long before the Cambrian explosion. But maybe the genetic evidence is wrong, and the “molecular clock” was running faster in the past than more recently. Or maybe complex organisms evolved long before the Cambrian, but left little or no fossil evidence. Or maybe the ancestors of today’s animals really did diverge early, but didn’t get complex until the Cambrian.

And why the explosion happened when it did is unresolved. Here’s a recent review. The early Snowball Earth episodes probably contributed in some way, and the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere must have been important. Or maybe there was some dramatic biological event that triggered the explosion: the origin of eyes, and/or the beginning of predation, setting off an arms race between predators and prey that’s been going on ever since.

If this last possibility is correct, then the transition from an Edenic, predator-free Ediacaran world to the Cambrian is a form of “symmetry breaking.” There is maybe an analogy here in human social evolution to the transition from an egalitarian society to a world of inequality, of rulers and ruled  (which also followed a – much milder – glacial episode).

Speaking of predation: the Logarithmic History blog is partly about commemorating great events in the past. It seems fitting to celebrate the Cambrian as the origin of seafood. If you take your time machine back to any time before the Cambrian, pickings will be slim – algae mostly, although we don’t really know what the Ediacara would have tasted like. The time-traveller’s menu gets a lot better with the Cambrian (although wood for a fire is still a problem). Nowadays you can’t hope to dine on trilobite, alas. (Check out March 13 last year for more of this sad story.) But sometime in the next few days why not have some mussels for dinner? (The recipe below has some non-Cambrian ingredients. It will be a few more days, incidentally, before the evolution of anything kosher.)

Steamed mussels, 4 servings

Wash and debeard:
4 to 6 pounds mussels
Place them in a large pot and add:
½ cup dry white wine
½ cup minced fresh parsley or other herbs
2 tablespoons chopped garlic
Cover the pot, place it over high heat, and cook, shaking the pot occasionally, until most of the mussels are opened, about 10 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to remove mussels to a serving bowl, then strain the cooking liquid over them. Drizzle over the mussels:
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
Juice of 1 lemon
Serve with:
Plenty of crusty bread (invented< 15,000 years ago, but who’s counting?)

Quest for fire, or, Eisenhower steak

930 – 881 thousand years ago

On June 3 on Logarithmic History, our ancestors had gotten as far as steak tartare. Now it’s time for an Eisenhower steak (cooked directly on the coals; see below).

What really distinguishes humans from other animals? We’ve covered some of the answers already, and will cover more in posts to come. But certainly one of the great human distinctions is that we alone use fire. Fire is recognized as something special not just by scientists, but in the many myths about how humans acquired fire. (It ain’t just Prometheus.) Claude Lévi-Strauss got a whole book out of analyzing South American Indian myths of how the distinction between raw and cooked separates nature from culture. (I admit this is where I get bogged down on Lévi-Strauss.)

Until recently the story about fire was that it came late, toward the latter days of Homo erectus. But Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard, turned this around with his book Catching Fire (which is not the same as this book), arguing that the taming of fire goes back much earlier, to the origin of Homo erectus. Wrangham argues that it was cooking in particular that set us on the road to humanity. Cooking allows human beings to extract much more of energy from foods (in addition to killing parasites). Homo erectus had smaller teeth and jaw than earlier hominins and probably a smaller gut, and it may have been fire that made this possible. Cooking is also likely to have affected social life, by focusing eating and socializing around a central place. (E O Wilson thinks that home sites favored intense sociality in both social insects and humans.)

Surviving on raw food is difficult for people in a modern high-tech environment and probably impossible for people in traditional settings. Anthropologists are always looking for human universals, and almost always finding exceptions (e.g. the vast majority of societies avoid regular brother-sister marriage, but there are a few exceptions, including Roman Egypt and Zoroastrian Iran). But cooking seems to be a real, true universal. No society is known where people got by without cooking. Tasmanians, isolated from the rest of the world for 10,000 years, with the simplest technology of any people in recent history, had lost the art of making fire, but still kept fires going and still cooked.

Recent archeological finds have pushed the date for controlled use of fire back to 1 million years ago, but not all the way back to the origin of Homo erectus. This doesn’t mean Wrangham is wrong. Fire sites don’t always preserve very well: we have virtually no archeological evidence of the first Americans controlling fire, but nobody doubts they were doing it. It could be that it will be the geneticists who will settle this one. The Maillard (or browning) reaction that gives cooked meat much of its flavor generates compounds that are toxic to many mammals but not (or not so much) to us. At some point we may learn just how far back genetic adaptations to eating cooked food go.

An alternative to an early date for fire, there is the recent theory that processing food, by chopping it up and mashing it with stone tools, was the crucial early adaptation.

Whenever it is exactly that humans started cooking, the date falls in (Northern hemisphere) grilling season on Logarithmic History, so you can celebrate the taming of fire accordingly. It doesn’t have to be meat you grill. Some anthropologists think cooking veggies was even more important. I recommend sliced eggplant particularly, brushed with olive oil to keep it from sticking, and with salt, pepper, and any other spices.

On the other hand, Homo erectus probably appreciated a good Eisenhower steak, cooked directly on the coals. (Yes, this actually works pretty well.)

Eisenhower Coal-Fired Steak

Named for the 34th president of the United States, who liked to cook his steaks directly on the coals, this preparation will create a crunchy, charred exterior with rosy, medium-rare meat inside.

Lump hardwood coals work better than briquettes for this recipe because they burn hotter. Be sure you use long-handled tongs. (Sorry, this method is for charcoal or wood grilling only.)

You might find an uneven exterior crust, especially when using lump charcoal, because it is irregularly shaped (unlike the uniform briquette pillows). If that happens, try to position the steak so that it is more directly on the coals and gets an even char. Clasp the steak in the tongs and rap the tongs against the edge of the grill to knock off the occasional clinging ember. If you have some ash, flick it off with a pastry brush.

Make Ahead: The steaks can be seasoned and refrigerated up to 4 hours in advance. Bring them to room temperature before they go on the fire.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• Two 1 1/2-inch-thick boneless rib-eye steaks (about 28 ounces total)
• 2 teaspoons coarse sea salt
• 2 teaspoons freshly cracked black pepper

---

DIRECTIONS

Prepare the grill for direct heat. Light the charcoal; when the coals are just covered in gray ash, distribute them evenly over the cooking area. For a hot fire (450 to 500 degrees), you should be able to hold your hand about 6 inches above the coals for 2 or 3 seconds. Have a spray water bottle at hand for taming any flames. But use it lightly; you don’t want to dampen the heat too much, and some flames here are fine.

Meanwhile, brush the oil on the both sides of the steaks, then season both sides liberally with salt and pepper.

Once the coals are ready, place the steaks directly on the coals (see headnote). Cook, uncovered, for 6 minutes on one side, then use tongs to turn them over. Cook for about 5 minutes on the second side.

Transfer the steaks to a platter to rest for 10 minutes. Serve as is, or cut them into 1/2-inch-thick slices.

A famous movie cut, from 2001: A Space Odyssey, transitions from a bone club, hurled aloft by an australopithecine 2.5 million years ago, to a spacecraft in the year 2001.

Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, coming up with the plot for the movie/book, were influenced by the popular author Robert Ardrey. In his book African Genesis, Ardrey casts human evolution as a version of the story of Cain and Abel, except in his version the peaceful vegetarians (robust australopithecines) get clobbered by the club-wielding meat-eaters (gracile australopithecines).

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments?  Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

Ardrey, along with Konrad Lorenz and Desmond Morris, was much in vogue in the 1960s: Sam Peckinpah was another movie director influenced by him. The man could turn a phrase. Unfortunately his speculations on evolution and human behavior are probably not of enduring value: he had the misfortune to take up the topic too early to take on board the sociobiological revolution pioneered by William Hamilton, Robert Trivers, and George Williams, and popularized by E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins.

Ardrey may not have been off-base in thinking that weaponry and warfare have been an important motive force in human biological and social evolution (more on this later). But where early stone tools are concerned, a different segue, from Oldowan chopper to Cuisnart may be more appropriate.

Recent research argues that early hominins could have dramatically increased available food energy by pounding vegetables and chopping up meat into more digestible pieces. Tool use may have been an early step in our ancestors’ move to high energy diets. Meat-eating began to be important in human evolution around 2.6 million years ago. Somewhat later we see evidence that some hominins have lighter jaws and aren’t chewing as much. So to celebrate this early dietary revolution, here’s a recipe:

Steak Tartare

Place in a food processor fitted with the metal chopping blade:

1 ½ pounds lean beef (tenderloin, top round, or sirloin) cut into ½ inch cubes

Pulse until meat is coarsely ground, 7-10 seconds. Do not over-process. Remove meat to a chilled platter or individual plates and gently form into 6 individual mounds.

[Optional: Make a spoon shaped indentation on top of each mound and crack into each

1 egg yolk.]

Divide and arrange in small piles around each serving:

½ cup minced onions
½ cup minced shallots
½ cup minced fresh parsley
¼ cup minced drained capers
8-12 anchovies (optional)

Serve immediately and pass separately:

Fresh lemon juice
Worcestershire sauce
Dijon mustard
Hot pepper sauce
Freshly ground black pepper
Salt

From The Joy of Cooking 1997

On the Origin of Seafood by Means of Natural Selection

Or the Preparation of Favorite Dishes in the Struggle for Dinner.

562-532 million years ago

The Cambrian explosion — shells and skeletons, and all the major animal phyla of today — is one of the major events in the history of life. It’s hard to miss – Darwin was well aware of it – because for the first time you have abundant well-preserved fossils of animals with hard parts. From now on, if I miss a tweet one day or another, it’s because I didn’t get to it, not because the evidence isn’t there.

Genetic evidence seemingly clashes with the fossil evidence. A “molecular clock” based on rates of gene divergence suggests that major animal phyla had begun diverging from one another long before the Cambrian explosion. But maybe the genetic evidence is wrong, and the “molecular clock” was running faster in the past than more recently. Or maybe complex organisms evolved long before the Cambrian, but left little or no fossil evidence. Or maybe the ancestors of today’s animals really did diverge early, but didn’t get complex until the Cambrian.

And why the explosion happened when it did is unresolved. Here’s a recent review. The early Snowball Earth episodes probably contributed in some way, and the rise of oxygen in the atmosphere must have been important. Or maybe there was some dramatic biological event that triggered the explosion: the origin of eyes, and/or the beginning of predation, setting off an arms race between predators and prey that’s been going on ever since.

If this last possibility is correct, then the transition from an Edenic, predator-free Ediacaran world to the Cambrian is a form of “symmetry breaking.” There is maybe an analogy here in human social evolution to the transition from an egalitarian society to a world of inequality, of rulers and ruled  (which also followed a – much milder – glacial episode).

Speaking of predation: the Logarithmic History blog is partly about commemorating great events in the past. It seems fitting to celebrate the Cambrian as the origin of seafood. If you take your time machine back to any time before the Cambrian, pickings will be slim – algae mostly, although we don’t really know what the Ediacara would have tasted like. The time-traveller’s menu gets a lot better with the Cambrian (although wood for a fire is still a problem). Nowadays you can’t hope to dine on trilobite, alas. (Check out March 13 last year for more of this sad story.) But sometime in the next few days why not have some mussels for dinner? (The recipe below has some non-Cambrian ingredients. It will be a few more days, incidentally, before the evolution of anything kosher.)

Steamed mussels, 4 servings

Wash and debeard:
4 to 6 pounds mussels
Place them in a large pot and add:
½ cup dry white wine
½ cup minced fresh parsley or other herbs
2 tablespoons chopped garlic
Cover the pot, place it over high heat, and cook, shaking the pot occasionally, until most of the mussels are opened, about 10 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to remove mussels to a serving bowl, then strain the cooking liquid over them. Drizzle over the mussels:
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
Juice of 1 lemon
Serve with:
Plenty of crusty bread (invented< 15,000 years ago, but who’s counting?)

No-knead bread

The Younger Dryas Cold Event, last hurrah of the last glaciation, is over. In the Near East, people are once again settling down in villages, harvesting wild grain, and hunting. Tomorrow on Logarithmic History comes the first generally recognized human domestication of plants – wheat and barley specifically. So to commemorate, here’s a recipe – one of the most popular ever from the New York Times – for no-knead bread that you can make overnight (although early farmers may have favored porridge and flatbread.)

Jared Diamond took a dour view of agriculture, calling it the “worst mistake in the history of the human race.” And fans of the paleo diet claim that you should try to eat like our ancestors did before the invention of farming. But there are counterarguments: Many hunter-gatherers ate more starch and sugar (in the form of honey) than paleo proponents assume. Also, human populations (at least populations of farmers) have evolved since the beginning of agriculture; many of us are no longer quite genetically adapted to a hunter-gatherer diet. Finally, feeding most of the planet on a meat-heavy paleo diet may be impossible.

In any case, studies from the They Institute (“They did this one study …”) show that bread won’t make you fat if you only eat bread you bake yourself. So indulge.

No-knead bread

Ingredients

• 3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
• ¼ teaspoon instant yeast
• 1 ¼ teaspoons salt
• Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed

Preparation

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.
2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.
3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.
4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Quest for fire

930 – 881 thousand years ago

On June 3 on Logarithmic History, our ancestors had gotten as far as steak tartare. Now it’s time for an Eisenhower steak (cooked directly on the coals; see below).

What really distinguishes humans from other animals? We’ve covered some of the answers already, and will cover more in posts to come. But certainly one of the great human distinctions is that we alone use fire. Fire is recognized as something special not just by scientists, but in the many myths about how humans acquired fire. (It ain’t just Prometheus.) Claude Lévi-Strauss got a whole book out of analyzing South American Indian myths of how the distinction between raw and cooked separates nature from culture. (I admit this is where I get bogged down on Lévi-Strauss.)

Until recently the story about fire was that it came late, toward the latter days of Homo erectus. But Richard Wrangham, a primatologist at Harvard, turned this around with his book Catching Fire (which is not the same as this book), arguing that the taming of fire goes back much earlier, to the origin of Homo erectus. Wrangham argues that it was cooking in particular that set us on the road to humanity. Cooking allows human beings to extract much more of energy from foods (in addition to killing parasites). Homo erectus had smaller teeth and jaw than earlier hominins and probably a smaller gut, and it may have been fire that made this possible. Cooking is also likely to have affected social life, by focusing eating and socializing around a central place. (E O Wilson thinks that home sites favored intense sociality in both social insects and humans.)

Surviving on raw food is difficult for people in a modern high-tech environment and probably impossible for people in traditional settings. Anthropologists are always looking for human universals, and almost always finding exceptions (e.g. the vast majority of societies avoid regular brother-sister marriage, but there are a few exceptions, including Roman Egypt and Zoroastrian Iran). But cooking seems to be a real, true universal. No society is known where people got by without cooking. Tasmanians, isolated from the rest of the world for 10,000 years, with the simplest technology of any people in recent history, had lost the art of making fire, but still kept fires going and still cooked.

Recent archeological finds have pushed the date for controlled use of fire back to 1 million years ago (see today’s tweet on Wonderwerk cave), but not all the way back to the origin of Homo erectus. This doesn’t mean Wrangham is wrong. Fire sites don’t always preserve very well: we have virtually no archeological evidence of the first Americans controlling fire, but nobody doubts they were doing it. It could be that it will be the geneticists who will settle this one. The Maillard (or browning) reaction that gives cooked meat much of its flavor generates compounds that are toxic to many mammals but not (or not so much) to us. At some point we may learn just how far back genetic adaptations to eating cooked food go.

An alternative to an early date for fire, there is the recent theory that processing food, by chopping it up and mashing it with stone tools, was the crucial early adaptation.

Whenever it is exactly that humans started cooking, the date falls in (Northern hemisphere) grilling season on Logarithmic History, so you can celebrate the taming of fire accordingly. It doesn’t have to be meat you grill. Some anthropologists think cooking veggies was even more important. I recommend sliced eggplant particularly, brushed with olive oil to keep it from sticking, and with salt, pepper, and any other spices.

On the other hand, Homo erectus probably appreciated a good Eisenhower steak, cooked directly on the coals. (Yes, this actually works pretty well.)

Eisenhower Coal-Fired Steak

Named for the 34th president of the United States, who liked to cook his steaks directly on the coals, this preparation will create a crunchy, charred exterior with rosy, medium-rare meat inside.

Lump hardwood coals work better than briquettes for this recipe because they burn hotter. Be sure you use long-handled tongs. (Sorry, this method is for charcoal or wood grilling only.)

You might find an uneven exterior crust, especially when using lump charcoal, because it is irregularly shaped (unlike the uniform briquette pillows). If that happens, try to position the steak so that it is more directly on the coals and gets an even char. Clasp the steak in the tongs and rap the tongs against the edge of the grill to knock off the occasional clinging ember. If you have some ash, flick it off with a pastry brush.

Make Ahead: The steaks can be seasoned and refrigerated up to 4 hours in advance. Bring them to room temperature before they go on the fire.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 teaspoon olive oil
• Two 1 1/2-inch-thick boneless rib-eye steaks (about 28 ounces total)
• 2 teaspoons coarse sea salt
• 2 teaspoons freshly cracked black pepper

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DIRECTIONS

Prepare the grill for direct heat. Light the charcoal; when the coals are just covered in gray ash, distribute them evenly over the cooking area. For a hot fire (450 to 500 degrees), you should be able to hold your hand about 6 inches above the coals for 2 or 3 seconds. Have a spray water bottle at hand for taming any flames. But use it lightly; you don’t want to dampen the heat too much, and some flames here are fine.

Meanwhile, brush the oil on the both sides of the steaks, then season both sides liberally with salt and pepper.

Once the coals are ready, place the steaks directly on the coals (see headnote). Cook, uncovered, for 6 minutes on one side, then use tongs to turn them over. Cook for about 5 minutes on the second side.

Transfer the steaks to a platter to rest for 10 minutes. Serve as is, or cut them into 1/2-inch-thick slices.

Your cuisnart, a prehistory

A famous movie cut, from 2001: A Space Odyssey, transitions from a bone club, hurled aloft by an australopithecine 2.5 million years ago, to a spacecraft in the year 2001.

Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, coming up with the plot for the movie/book, were influenced by the popular author Robert Ardrey. In his book African Genesis, Ardrey casts human evolution as a version of the story of Cain and Abel, except in his version the peaceful vegetarians (robust australopithecines) get clobbered by the club-wielding meat-eaters (gracile australopithecines).

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments?  Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.

Ardrey, along with Konrad Lorenz and Desmond Morris, was much in vogue in the 1960s: Sam Peckinpah was another movie director influenced by him. The man could turn a phrase. Unfortunately his speculations on evolution and human behavior are probably not of enduring value: he had the misfortune to take up the topic too early to take on board the sociobiological revolution pioneered by William Hamilton, Robert Trivers, and George Williams, and popularized by E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins.

Ardrey may not have been off-base in thinking that weaponry and warfare have been an important motive force in human biological and social evolution (more on this later). But where early stone tools are concerned, a different segue, from Oldowan chopper to Cuisnart may be more appropriate.

Recent research argues that early hominins could have dramatically increased available food energy by pounding vegetables and chopping up meat into more digestible pieces. Tool use may have been an early step in our ancestors’ move to high energy diets. Meat-eating began to be important in human evolution around 2.6 million years ago. Somewhat later we see evidence that some hominins have lighter jaws and aren’t chewing as much. So to celebrate this early dietary revolution, here’s a recipe:

Steak Tartare

Place in a food processor fitted with the metal chopping blade:

1 ½ pounds lean beef (tenderloin, top round, or sirloin) cut into ½ inch cubes

Pulse until meat is coarsely ground, 7-10 seconds. Do not over-process. Remove meat to a chilled platter or individual plates and gently form into 6 individual mounds.

[Optional: Make a spoon shaped indentation on top of each mound and crack into each

1 egg yolk.]

Divide and arrange in small piles around each serving:

½ cup minced onions
½ cup minced shallots
½ cup minced fresh parsley
¼ cup minced drained capers
8-12 anchovies (optional)

Serve immediately and pass separately:

Fresh lemon juice
Worcestershire sauce
Dijon mustard
Hot pepper sauce
Freshly ground black pepper
Salt

From The Joy of Cooking 1997