In a new study published in The Quarterly Review of Biology, Dr. Karen Hardy and her team bring together archaeological, anthropological, genetic, physiological and anatomical data to argue that carbohydrate consumption, particularly in the form of starch, was critical for the accelerated expansion of the human brain
over the last million years, and
coevolved both with copy number variation of the salivary amylase genes and controlled fire use for cooking.
«But it's possible that selfishness happened first, and
over time, some of these species
coevolved to become more mutualistic.»