LSAT 150, Section 1, RC Passage 4, Cooking

RC Passage 4 Explanation

PASSAGE TEXT: It might reasonably have been expected that the adoption of cooking by early …

Paragraph Summaries

1. It might seem like cooking wouldn’t change human digestive anatomy, since cooked food is easier to process. But the authors argue that humans are now so adapted to cooked food that surviving on raw food in the wild is normally not realistic.
2. One possible effect of cooking is the reduction of human tooth and jaw size. This may have begun around 100,000 years ago, or even earlier with Homo ergaster, and later cooking improvements may explain later dental changes.
3. Changes in the soft digestive system are harder to study because they don’t fossilize. Features once explained as adaptations to raw meat may instead, or also, be adaptations to cooked, calorie-dense food.

Analysis

The passage is pretty straightforward: the authors are proposing the cooking hypothesis.

The key is that cooking didn’t just help humans eat food more easily. It may have changed human bodies so much that raw-food survival became difficult in the wild.

The evidence is suggestive, not conclusive. Teeth and jaws give the clearest fossil support because they got smaller over time. Gut anatomy is harder because soft tissues don’t fossilize, so the authors are mostly challenging the old raw-meat explanation.

Main trap: don’t make the passage stronger than it is. The authors aren’t saying cooking definitely explains all human digestive anatomy. They’re saying it’s a plausible explanation that deserves testing.