How eating meat helped our ancestors speak

I believe humans first learned to speak when they found out a way to make the meat tender without having to tear it with their tiny teeth.

Fire was not invented yet and nobody knew how to cook many millions of years ago, and our ancestors’ teeth were not sharp enough and not designed to cut through the tissues and sinews of raw meat.

So some bright spark in the group of hunters, fed up with chewing and chewing for hours on meat, decided to smash it against a rock and make it tender.

I only came to know about this when scientists did some detective work to find out how humans ate raw meat despite the fact that our teeth are made for masticating only softer food items and fruit and vegetables.

One palaeoanthropologist (a branch of anthropology concerned with primitive humans) in America ate raw meat for the sake of science and found it was like chewing gum. He had to chew and chew on it for a long time and nothing happened. It remained a wad of meat in his mouth, he wrote in a scientific paper.

That also seems to happen to me a lot.

“Let’s try out this restaurant,” said my wife one weekend. “The food reviewer said the Argentine beefsteaks are tender and moist.”

The thick slabs of meat came on ancient-looking pieces of stone and I wondered if the cook’s ancestor was with him in the kitchen helping him prepare the food.

The meat seemed juicy and tender as I cut through easily with the huge, murderous knife. A massive napkin was provided to diners and I chewed and smiled and nodded and chewed, but I just could not make the morsel small enough to swallow. “Enjoy your dinner,” said the waiter after he saw how much fun I was having with my food.

Heated discussion

The other day we tried out a new cook after the last one decided to return to her home country after a million years of working in the UAE. We did not know that the new cook was a vegetarian and that she had learned how to cook meat from watching videos on YouTube. I bought her the choicest cuts of goat meat from the neighbourhood grocery, after enquiring whether the goat was from India. “It’s from Pakistan,” said the Bangladeshi butcher. “That’s fine,” I said. “I just can’t eat Australian sheep. Too much fat. Medium cubes,” I said.

“Balti gosht,” said the cook, placing the curry dish she had made on the table. “A famous dish from Lahore,” she said, and then we nearly got into a heated discussion about whether butter chicken was Indian or British.

“Balti Gosht” loosely translates into “bucket meat” and it took a lot of chewing. “I think we should get our protein from tofu and peanuts in the future,” I told my wife later.

Scientists found from fossil records that human jaws and teeth became smaller over time and they believe it happened after some kind of processing was done to make meat a regular part of their diets.

A sharp stone tool was used to slice meat and maybe pound it on a rock. Once the food was processed outside the mouth, it left our ancestors free time to use their mouths for other things, such as speaking, according to scientists.

So, now you know how that person in your life who irritates you with his bragging and that person with her constant nagging, got the gift of speech?

It is enough to turn a man into a vegetarian, a vegan or that passenger on a plane to India who knows what a “veg” meal is.

Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai.