Contrary to what popular wisdom says, the first human profession was that of a cook – and not that of a prostitute. That’s what a study published by Harvard University says.
The reasoning goes like this: if prostitution arose when an ancestor of ours offered sex in exchange for food or shelter, there were already food gatherers and warriors to protect her. “It is certain that the hunters came before the farmers. Food gatherers are probably even older,” says Patrick Geary, a historian at the University of California.
Still, other species of animals also gather food, hunt and prostitute themselves – behavior observed in other primates. Cooking, however, would have been the first job exclusive to human beings. The activity would have appeared 2 million years ago with the homo erectus. Among them, specialization in food preparation already existed, as evidenced by utensils found near fossils of the time. “In addition to being the first profession, it is also the one that defined us as a species”, argues Chris Organ, a Harvard biologist and one of the co-authors of the study.
SOURCES: Energetic Consequences of Thermal and Nonthermal Food Processing, published in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.