Since the dawn of time,
the importance of one question has outweighed all others:
what's for dinner?
From the wind chilled tundras of the Arctic,
to the dry dunes of the Sahara,
all the way to the deepest rainforests of the Amazon.
Our omnivorous nature has allowed humans
to survive, and thrive.
But how did we go from hunting and gathering
on the Serengeti,
to grabbing a snack from the fridge?
Perhaps the answer was as elemental as
the kiss of fire.
Once our ancient ancestors tasted that
first cooked meal, there was no going back.
Cooking has driven human evolution,
invention, and progress.
In this series, we'll serve up a story
two million years in the making,
of what was,
is,
and will be
on our plates.
(grand orchestral music)
(dramatic music)
Almost nine million years ago,
our ape-like ancestors began their descent from trees,
onto the grasslands of the African Savannah.
What drove them from branches to bipedalism
has puzzled us, their descendants, for millennia.
Could the explanation be as simple as an empty stomach?
Over millions of years, the climate of Africa shifted.
Dense forests gave way to great, grassy landscapes,
teeming with delicious new species of flora and fauna.
Meet Little Foot.
She's a 3.6 million year old Australopithecus.
Discovered in the Sterkfontein Caves of South Africa,
Little Foot is the most complete skeleton ever found
of these ancient human ancestors.
Australopithecine were a lot like chimpanzees,
and they ate like it too.
Little Foot may do scavenging in the grasslands and trees
for her meals.
On the menu?
Low calorie, fibrous fare of seeds, grasses, and fruit.
Richard Wrangham is a Harvard primatologist.
The Australopithecine, these relatives between maybe
seven million years ago and two million years ago,
they were, of the simplest kind of level,
like chimpanzees that stood up right.
That is to say, they walked on their hind legs,
if you like.
They were about the size of chimpanzees.
They has big jaws like chimps, big teeth like chimps.
I mean you could imagine somebody like Mick Jagger
opening his mouth and screaming out and that mouth
is just a tiny little mouth compared to what
a chimpanzee or Australopithecus can do.
They need big teeth to mash this low quality,
high fiber food.
They need a big mouth to put it all into.
To get their something like 2,000 calories a day,
they have to spend about six hours a day just chewing,
literally just moving their jaws up and down,
processing this bulky, low energy food.
So it's a lot of work.
To digest the hard vegetation,
Little Foot had a longer large intestine and colon.
Here, her intestinal microbes ferment and break down
the good to release a little hard earned nutrition.
But humans today don't have to work so hard.
When we compare ourselves with
our closest relatives, then what we see is that
everything about our digestive system is reduced.
It is diminutive, so we have a small mouth,
we have small teeth, we small guts.
This all reflects the fact that we have a very
high quality diet.
We have a lot of nutrients per mouthful.
While we might struggle to see the
resemblance between Little Foot and ourselves,
the next stage of our evolution became distinctly
more human.
Around two million years ago,
that's when you get, for the first time, the emergence
of the full genus homo, Homo-Erectus.
The bones are a little bit heavier,
they've got rather big, broad faces,
with big brow ridges.
So they definitely look kind of
primitive compared to us, but nevertheless,
they were human.
What ignited our bodies to
evolve so drastically?
We cannot understand humans as evolving
into this species who was eating, and committed to,
very highly digestible food, without them using fire.
(lightening strikes)
Lightening strikes.
Raging forest fires.
Volcanic eruptions.
These fiery forces of natures must have
been terrifying for our ancient ancestors, like Little Foot.
But these dangerous phenomena also yielded great
bounty for daring foragers.
Scavengers discovered that tough tubers
and the flesh of animals tasted far better
when they'd been touched by fire.
Once you have fire, everything changes.
So, when did we harness this power?
Archeology and geo-archeology is important
in trying to solve this big mystery,
which is how we became human.
Dr. Francesco Berna and his colleagues
have discovered enlightening evidence of
humanity's early relationship with fire.
In the deep recesses of South Africa's Wonderwerk Cave.
We're showing that this intimate relationship
between human and fire is directly documented starting
1.7 million years ago.
The peculiarity and the magnificence of this cave
is that it contains evidence of humans being in there
since the origin of humanity.
It is an archaeologic phenomenon because it has
a sequence of human occupation which
sees of through our evolution as a species
from Homo-Erectus into modern humans as homo sapiens.
(soft music)
This is a block of intact sediment which we have
taken from the context of 1.78 million years old
and older, in Wonderwerk Cave.
So, over here,
we have an intact bone from specimen X,
which is discolored.
Sometimes discoloration may indicate staining
from the sediments which surround the bone.
Other times it may indicate burning.
The slides of this ancient Earth
hold remnants of a hugely consequential moment
in human history.
There's a long particle here.
It shows the characteristic of being wood ash.
This seemingly simple discovery
is anything but.
Dr. Berna has found the oldest known evidence
of humanity's use of fire.
That's extremely exciting to put human and fire
in the same spot early on in human evolution.
With the controlled use of fire,
we first began to cook our food.
This act of transformation had revolutionary
effects on our sustenance.
(sizzling)
So basically heat jiggles molecules and breaks
them apart and that's nice.
When you cook, you are saving yourself a lot of
the energy that otherwise, the body would be using
to digest raw food.
So we get a bonus from how much of the food can be digested,
and we get a bonus from saving ourselves the cost of
digesting the food.
Thanks to cooking, we had a newfound
surplus of energy, which went straight to our heads.
We're not using that metabolic energy for our gut.
What should we do with it?
Hm.
Let's make a bigger brain.
We have the largest brain in relationship
to body weight of any primate.
For the average person, about a quarter of all
of the food calories you eat go to fueling your brain.
So this is an organ that is only a 40th
of your body weight, but is occupying a quarter
of your food, so it's incredibly hungry and expensive
to fuel all the time.
Cooking with fire sparked our evolution.
And we've had one thing on our minds ever since:
filling our stomachs.
Technological breakthroughs, like stone tools,
helped us to kill and prepare our suppers.
And we continue to be keen gatherers.
The importance of fire to fuel our minds
and light our way, never waived.
Fire was essential to our first hunter-gatherer societies.
We lived as hunter-gatherers for millions of years.
Today, the lifestyle that made us who we are,
is practiced in only a few remote corners of the world.
(whistling)
In Tanzania, near Olduvai Gorge, the cradle of human kind,
lives one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer societies,
the Hadzabe.
Their lifestyle and diet
gives the world an important insight into our human history.
(birds chirping) (soft music)
It's mid morning in the Hadzabe camp,
and it's time for the first meal of the day.
(soft music)
The group of men and women head out to the nearest
Baobab tree.
These Baobabs can be thousands of years old,
supplying delicious fruit to generations of Hadzabe.
The women break down the fibrous, delicious fruits.
(women chattering)
The Baobad fruit is the staple of the Hadzabe diet,
packed with vitamins, fat, and fiber.
The high levels of vitamin C provide an unexpected
citrus tang.
(birds chirping)
Kongorobi berries are refreshing and slightly sweet,
and they happen to pack 20 times the fiber of
your average farmed berry.
The Hadzabe see food wherever they look
in their native land.
They eat an amazing variety of almost 600 plant
and animal species.
With their bountiful diet, they eat about 100 grams
of fiber a day, 10 times for than the average American.
This nourishment provides the Hadzabe men
with the energy they need for hunting.
They're hoping to track a few Dik-Dik, or Kudu.
(dramatic music)
Like the hundreds of generations before him,
Nyoha grew up hunting on these Hadzabe ancestral lands.
It takes years of training
and incredible strength, to hunt with one of these weapons.
The Hadzabe must observe and study their environment,
and hunting teaches a great lesson.
Patience.
Nyoha finally has something in his sights,
a pimbi, or rock rabbit.
(vocalizing)
(soft music)
(woman speaking foreign language)
The lean meat is cooked over an open fire.
In the life of a hunter-gatherer,
meat is only a small part of a diet,
and only after a successful hunt.
Most of their nutrition and calories
come from tubers, berries, vegetation,
and when it's in season, a Hadzabe favorite, honey.
(whistling)
Nyoha is listening intently for the song
of the Tika Rico bird, or the Honeyguide.
The Hadzabe have a developed a language with these birds,
and the two species enjoy a deep
and mutually beneficial relationship.
High in these branches in the world's finest
all natural dessert.
(soft music)
(bees buzzing) (dramatic music)
This sweet snack is one of the most energy dense
foods found in nature.
Full of fat, protein, and sugar.
The Hadzabe diet is seasonal,
and deeply entwined with the environment.
The lives of the Hadzabe give us a glimpse into
how our ancient ancestors ate.
(chattering in foreign language)
On the other side of the world,
the benefit of the hunter-gatherer diet
is being investigated.
A lot of what we've learned from hunter-gatherer diets
is a window into how our ancestors ate for most
of our evolutionary history.
It was a high fiber diet, they definitely had treats like
meat and honey.
Those things were rare and their diet
was heavily, heavily based on plants.
They eat the things that are seasonally available
that is important to maintain our microbial ecosystem.
Doctors Erica and Justin Sonnenberg
and their colleagues have been studying the effects
of the hunter-gatherer diet on the human microbiome.
Our specialty is studying the gut microbiome,
this complex community of microbes that lives
in our gut.
We're interested in how the collection of microbes
that inhabit our gut influences everything from
our immune status, to our metabolism,
to even our moods and behaviors through our
central nervous system.
Study of the human microbiome is often
concerned with the way in which this mini ecosystem
can affect human health.
One of the questions that our lab is interested
in addressing is what is a healthy microbiome?
In traditional populations, people that live like
our ancestors did hundreds of thousands of years ago,
hunting and gathering for food,
we see a huge increase in diversity, so many more types
of species in their gut than are living in
the western gut.
The Hadzabe have among the most diverse
human guts on the planet, with almost double the
amount of fungi and flora of those living
on a western diet.
What we're realizing now is that the
western microbiome, microbiome associated with
industrialized societies, is probably something that
deviates wildly from the community that we evolved with,
and maybe a community that's actually predisposing us
to some of our most common and serious diseases.
These are things like heart disease,
a lot of autoimmune diseases, things like allergies
and asthma, inflammatory bowel diseases, cancers,
and most of these are diseases that we just don't
see in the Hadza.
(laughing)
Learning from the Hadzabe and making the
effort to improve our gut health by rewilding
our diet may be a key ingredient in fighting some
of the industrial world's most deadly chronic diseases.
The diversity of the Hadzabe diet comes from
their connection to the environment,
and a way of life that has endured the ages.
(people chattering in foreign language)
(soft music)
7,000 miles away, the traditional ingredients
of another ancient people are being brought
to the attention of the modern world,
and what chefs are discovering is that these ingredients
aren't just healthy, they're delicious.
Here in Wollongong, Australia, ancient bush ingredients
called bush tucker by the aboriginal natives,
are cooked up into mouthwatering, new age dishes.
(soft music)
So we do Australian cuisine,
using local produce, but also using inspiration from
our local surroundings.
We use native ingredients.
Things like native fruits, there's some native game birds,
things like wallaby, kangaroo, herbs and spices.
There's some amazing, unique ingredients
in Australia at the moment.
One of the deserts that's on our menu
is the Australian fruit tart.
Most of these fruits might seem somewhat difficult to
work with, but we've found ways in which we can apply them.
Chefs Tom and Simon are trying to create
and inspire a truly unique Australian cuisine.
You can do whatever you want, which makes it really,
like, really exciting, and there's no boundaries.
(soft music)
What we're trying to push us the use of
these native ingredients, acknowledging the culture,
acknowledging the history and put into modern dishes.
(soft music)
Living for 50,000 years in isolation,
the aborigines of Australia are one of the
most resourceful peoples on Earth.
The aboriginal people have been here for thousands
and thousands of years.
Put that into perspective.
When was Jesus born?
About 2,000 years ago.
How old are those Egyptians?
About 5,000.
When you're talking 40, 50,000 years or more,
yeah, there's been a lot of practice.
This is my supermarket out here.
I've got fish out there,
I've got all sorts of seashells,
boundless resources out there,
let alone up here on the land.
And when I bring fellas down here to teach
'em about it, it's also a university.
But European settlers and modern day
Australians have rarely looked to the aborigines
for edible inspiration.
You can go to any market or a food fair,
anywhere in Australia, and you can find every cuisine
from every country from around the world.
China or Morocco or Italian or anything.
But you aint find a bush tucker.
Hey.
It's slowly evolving.
I go around teaching people about my culture
through the way of bush foods and trying to
introduce 'em into another way of living and knowledge.
The native animals and plant life
of Australia evolved in isolation,
leading to a diversity of ingredients
unique to the rest of the world.
Here we have a finger lime, which is a native lime,
extremely tasty and very, very special.
They basically look like little caviar,
but lime tasting and you pop them and they're little
bursts of acidity.
(soft music)
The one thing about native ingredients is we need
to have the understanding that it's a reflection
of Australia, and a reflection of our environment
and our weather, especially.
And so, you talk about Australia, it's so hot,
it's so dry.
If you've ever grown strawberries, you know strawberries
need a lot of water to be sweet and so our native fruits
are all sour, bitter, green, because we don't have the water
that it requires to be a sweet fruit.
If you think about emu, wallaby, kangaroo, all really lean
because they don't have the ample amount of food to have
those fat reserves.
Just got some brazed wallaby tail.
Very much like oxtail, wallaby tail.
It's quite fatty, gelatinous meat.
Takes quite a lot of cooking,
but really delicious once you do.
There's definitely trial and error,
and I think as chefs you can take an ingredient,
you can taste it, you can work out flavors
it's gonna work with.
Also from people we've done work with.
Fred from Fred's Bush Tucker,
we were cooking with him, he sort of taught us some
very traditional ways.
We've taken that into the kitchen and replicated that.
So, I have a barramundi, dry aged it for about three days.
This dish is based on quite a traditional way
of cooking barramundi.
You take a whole barramundi, wrap it in paper bark
soaked in water, layer it with a layer of myrtle leaves.
The smoke will come up through the myrtle,
flavoring the fish.
You can smell it now.
It fills the room.
So this is the salad that goes with the barramundi.
Being a coastal city, we just have access to
amazing beaches and there's so much edible plants
and foods there.
If you stop and look, you can find some
pretty tasty stuff.
Restaurants like Caveau are finding
inspiration in underutilized natural food diversity
to bring old flavors to modern diners.
We wanna see these ingredients just treated
as normal ingredients.
I think that's the future, just getting them into
home kitchens, demystifying what they are
and how they react.
And it's starting get there.
(soft music)
The importance of this food revival
goes beyond mere tastes and flavors.
A lot of our elders are dying these days.
If we don't do something about our aboriginal culture now,
through food, through tourism, through art,
we're gonna lose it.
The aboriginal people are just gonna lose
their knowledge, and you've got to share your knowledge
to keep it, really.
So that's part of my role.
I feel, to try and impart some of the knowledge
that I have, to the younger generation
and the general public.
(soft music)
I want more fellas out there doing what those
fellas are doing and showing off our proud culture.
All the ingredients are here in our backyard.
The diversity inherent in reintroducing these
foods to our diets is in sharp contrast
to how most of us eat today, to our own detriment.
If we are to improve our health in the future,
we must take some lessons from the past.
No matter who you are, or what you eat,
cooking deserves its place as one of the great
revolutionary innovations of history.
I believe that humans became human
when an ape learned to cook.
So truly, it is impossible to imagine humans
as a species without fire.
Fire is what made us.
Fire is the creator of the human species.
We are the creatures of the flame.
The camp fires of our ancestors
have become the restaurants and kitchens of today.
Cooking has moved on from food touched by fire
to culinary works of art.
We fry,
roast,
boil,
and bake.
Cooking changed our bodies,
our brain, and ignited a cognitive revolution
in human beings.
This would lead to an equally consequential period
in human history, the agricultural revolution.
This epic event turned our hunter-gatherer lifestyle
on its head, and introduced a plethora of new plant
and animal species to our diets,
and it all led to one of the greatest inventions
in culinary history, the taco.
(soft music) (birds chirping)