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  3. You are what you eat, or so the saying goes. But Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, believes that this is true in a more p

You are what you eat, or so the saying goes. But Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, believes that this is true in a more p

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问题     You are what you eat, or so the saying goes. But Richard Wrangham, of Harvard University, believes that this is true in a more profound sense than the one implied by the old proverb. It is not just you who are what you eat, but the entire human species. And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr. Wrangham’s opinion is that its food is so often cooked.
    Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr. Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity have developed alongside. In fact, as he outlined to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Chicago, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s "killer application": the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent—changes that have made people such unusual animals.
    Humans became human, as it were, with the emergence 1.8 million years ago of a species called Homo erectus. This had a skeleton much like modern man’s—a big, brain-filled skull and a narrow pelvis and rib cage, which imply a small abdomen and thus a small gut. Hitherto, the explanation for this shift from the smaller skulls and wider pelvises of man’s apelike ancestors has been a shift from a vegetable-based diet to a meat-based one. Meat has more calories than plant matter, the theory went. A smaller gut could therefore support a larger brain.
    Dr. Wrangham disagrees. When you do the sums, he argues, raw meat is still insufficient to bridge the gap. He points out that even modern "raw foodists", members of a town-dwelling, back-to-nature social movement, struggle to maintain their weight—and they have access to animals and plants that have been bred for the table. Pre-agricultural man confined to raw food would have starved.
    Start cooking, however, and things change radically. Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It "denatures" protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it.
It is stated that humans had changed from their apelike ancestors to Homo erectus probably because
选项 A、they could support a larger brain with smaller gut.
B、they had a narrow pelvis and rib cage.
C、they began to eat cooked meat and vegetables.
D、they took meat as the staple of diet.
答案D
解析 事实细节题，考查因果细节。根据apelike ancestors定位到第三段第三句。句中指出人类从类猿祖先的小头骨和宽盆骨到如今体格的转变随着人们的饮食由蔬菜变为肉类而实现。故选D项。
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