Viraj's Weblog

At work there are really interesting tech talks that go on many times during the week. Sometimes they are not even related to computers.

I saw a recent talk about stone tools and their relationship to human evolution. Hopefully they will put it on video.google.com soon.

Anyway, it was explained that at some point in human evolution the pre-humans started making stone tools. One of the major possible benefits of such tools was breaking the hide of animals, accessing bone marrow, etc. This allowed humans to tap into a high fat meat diet, which in turn caused an increase in energy supplied to the brain, and further allowing an increase in brain size. A feedback look was created, and brain size skyrocketed from the apes. There was a direct correlation between human invention and human evolution.

What was also cool is the presenter went through brain imaging scans while trying to make stone tools, as well as did research trying to analyze the body physiology during toolmaking.

It made me think of how we can affect our evolution by our actions, and how much significance a change in diet was. I think we need to be careful what sort of diets we get into. Ultimately we eat to provide energy for our brain. If the foods don't do that, it may cause more damage than we think.