The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution
In the The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution (2010), Timothy Taylor traces human development in the context of primates and makes the case that our Homo genus ancestors emerged in tandem with the tools they developed.
It’s a simple but powerful premise: humans do not exist without manufactured tools. Unlike other members of our primate family, the physical limitations of Homo sapiens requires us to process food outside of our bodies to support digestion. Building upon the successes of digging sticks and stones, humans used fire and vessels enabling fermentation to make nourishing food that supported the development of our brains, which are outsized in energy demands compared to our primate kin. The earliest processing technologies made food safe, nutrient-dense, and bioavailable.
The increased intellectual capacity of our ancestors enabled further technologies that gradually enabled humans to spread across the globe, resulting in modern cultures that have shifted out of sync with the planet's ecological systems.
The Food Initiative fuses wisdom from our ancestral past with appropriate modern technology to create nourishing food that recalls our role as stewards of the planet that supports us.
