Humans over 100,000 years ago, lived in caves along South Africa’s coastline and cooked with starches:
Small pieces of charred tubers found at the Klasies River site in South Africa date back 120,000 years, making them the earliest-known evidence of H. sapiens cooking carbs, according to recent research published in the Journal of Human Evolution…
Cynthia Larbey, an archaeologist at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and lead author of the new study, suspects that roasting tubers provided critical nutrition to our species. “It was the way we were able to continue feeding ourselves as we moved and migrated,” she says. Hunting was difficult and unreliable, so “it was a skill to be able to find food as they moved to different ecologies.”…
“This is really a very nice find,” says Simcha Lev-Yadun, a paleobotanist at the University of Haifa in Israel. Lev-Yadun was part of the team that discovered evidence of hominins roasting nuts and tubers 780,000 years ago. Sarah Wild, “Scientists Find First Evidence of Humans Cooking Starches” at Sapiens
As cooks know, starches are much easier to keep and more versatile than meats.
The article is noteworthy for not claiming that starches explain human brain development.
See also: See also: Eating fat, not meat, led to bigger human type brains, say researchers. Theories of the evolution of the human brain are a war of trivial explanations that no one dare admit are too trivial for what they purport to explain. It’s like blaming World War II on indigestion, only monstrously bigger.
Earlier discussion of the fat theory.
Starchy food may have aided human brain development
Do big brains matter to human intelligence?
Human evolution: The war of trivial explanations
and
What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness
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