As a species of seemingly feeble, naked apes, we humans are unlikely candidates for power in a natural world where dominant adaptations can boil down to speed, agility, jaws and claws. Why we rose to rule, while our hominin relatives died out, has long been a curiosity for scientists.
The beginning of human cognition, for example, is the result of the development of a larger brain, which can be represented by artifacts—stone tools, weapons—or productions that signify greater abilities for thinking and innovation.
Although the adaptation of a larger brain may separate humans from their primate relatives, it also came at a cost of increased fuel requirements. A human brain uses at least 20 percent of an individual's resting metabolism.
Evidence of early humans use of fire could be used to mark how they overcame their energy needs. Heat helps free up energy by softening foods, denaturing their proteins and breaking down toxins, which is why cooking can explain one fundamental reason for human brain size as well as small canine teeth and small guts in comparison to other primates.
Just as revelationary for us at sandwich HQ, is the finding of starch grains on 30,000-year-old grinding stones, which suggest that prehistoric man may have dined on an early form of flat bread, contrary to his popular image as primarily a meat-eater.
The findings, published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal, indicate that Palaeolithic Europeans ground down plant roots
similar to potatoes to make flour, which was later whisked into dough.
We at sandwich theories are not emphatically suggesting cavemen sat around campfires, cutting up baked dough into slices with their stone tools and making Mammoth sandwiches as pack lunch in preparation for the following day's hunt, but the importance of storing food for leaner times, must have been a regular concern and it would be reasonable to suggest cold meats and bread where indeed stored for long hunting trips, as the Arctic Inuit have been found to store Auk birds in seal skin in preparation for winter.
In this instance the Arctic is perfect for cold storage, unlike the plains of Africa. Furthermore, meat is a highly perishable product but it can be cured by smoking and salting as Cro-Magnon Man had found out 35,000 years ago.
We could look back even further for origins but this would require a much bigger leap of the imagination. It is fair to say that the less aggressive, up-right walking, sophisticated Bonobo chimps, are not given to further hyperlect in the throwing of tea parties in front of their slightly bemused cousins -to say we'd be drawing inferences from too small examples would be a massive understatement, but whether you believe in Savannah theory or Aquatic ape theory, (escaping the jungles or the sea) the retreat back into the interior for answers, as colonel Kurtz and Captain Nemo found to their respective nadirs, are in the same sense, the great pioneering costs, which have to be paid, to further contribute to the sum of human knowledge.
This is why for the less adventurous amongst us it took the likes of modern man, such as John Montagu to happen on a possibly age-old practice by mere chance. Though he lived in the age of enlightenment, societies capacity for forensics in his time were nothing compared with the speed at which it answers -or throws up more questions- in discoveries evident today.
Who could now deny the possible supremacy of bread and meat being eaten together? Whether it is eaten cold or not or even in the same mouthful I believe we have already convincingly covered.
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