Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Hard

PT150 S1 P4 Q25 ExplanationEvolutionary Implications of Cooking

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Passage

It might reasonably have been expected that the adoption of cooking by early humans would not have led to any changes in human digestive anatomy. After all, cooking makes food easier to eat, which means that no special adaptations are required to process cooked food. However, current evidence suggests that humans today such efficiency, we suggest, led to an inability to survive on raw-food diets in the wild.

Important questions therefore arise concerning what limits the ability of humans to utilize raw food. The principal effect of cooking considered to date has been a reduction in tooth and jaw size over evolutionary time. Human tooth and jaw size show signs of decreasing approximately 100,000 years ago; we suggest that this may prove to result from later modifications in cooking technique, such as the adoption of boiling.

The evolution of soft parts of the digestive system is harder to reconstruct because they leave no fossil record. Human digestive anatomy differs from that of the other great apes in ways that have traditionally been explained as adaptations to a high raw-meat diet. Differences include the smaller gut volume, longer small meat. Testing between the cooking and raw-meat models for understanding human digestive anatomy is therefore warranted.

What this question is testing

Strengthen

Your task

Find the choice that makes the argument's conclusion more likely to be true.

Common trap

Answers that are consistent with the argument but add no real support, or that strengthen a claim the argument doesn't make.

Winning move

Locate the gap between evidence and conclusion, then pick the choice that closes it.

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question
25.

Which one of the following, if true, would provide the most support for the authors’ claim in the sentence immediately preceding the parenthetical remark

Answer choices, explained

  1. Unclear Impact14% picked this

    Evidence from cut marks on animal bones suggests that early humans' hominid ancestors used stone flake

    Does "butchering" animals mean that you cooked them? Probably. Sometimes carcasses are butchered just so they're easier to carry, but usually you'd be carrying them back to your cave to cook them. But so what? Whether we know they cooked or not doesn't seem to speak directly to the timeline of whether it's been for long enough to have a biological evolutionary effect.

  2. Correct36% picked this

    Human populations are estimated to have adapted biologically to drinking the milk of domesticated animals in

    Why this is right

    This affirms the assumption that "250k years would be enough time for something to have a biological impact on humans". After all, 5k years was enough to have a biological impact, in the case of milk.

    Skill tested: Strengthen · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

  3. No Impact17% picked this

    Archaeological evidence indicates that the adoption of fire use by humans coincided with climatic changes

    I don't know what ice ages has to do with whether humans have been cooking long enough for evolution to have changed human biology in response.

  4. No Impact13% picked this

    An increase in the quantities of the trace element strontium in bones of early humans indicates an increase in the quantity of

    While it's always a pleasure to hear from my two favorite elements (boron and strontium), this answer isn't doing anything to address the issue at hand: is 250k years long enough for a biological impact on humans.

  5. Too Weak21% picked this

    The fossil record indicates that the brain volume of hominid species started growing after tooth and

    This answer seems like maybe it could kind of strengthen if we did a lot of mental work. Since tooth and jaw size started decreasing 100k years ago, and brain volume started growing after that, this would mean that there have been some biological evolution changes within the past 100k years. It's harder here to know, though, whether those evolutionary changes are a response to cooking. In the correct answer, we have a more compelling data point, where something that was definitely related to dietary changes had a biological impact on humans in way less time than 250k years.

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