The Culinary Origins of Human Occupation: Part 1 (Motor and Process Skills)

Abstract

While occupation is increasingly recognized as a biologically determined trait of Homo sapiens, current understanding of human occupation rests primarily on observations of contemporary human beings, and it is often further limited by geographic, cultural, and historical considerations. Recent efforts to expand existing biological, anthropological, and evolutionary knowledge of human occupation have been hampered by a failure to provide a cogent causal explanation for the origin of occupation among our hominid ancestors that might help to optimize occupational interventions on the basis of a clearer understanding of the specific evolutionary triggers that impelled proto-human beings to become occupational human beings. This paper, the first of two, proposes that human occupation cannot be understood in a biologically valid evolutionary sense without an appreciation of energy metabolism as the primary cause of human occupational evolution; that our hominid ancestors evolved into occupational human beings in response to clearly identifiable climatological events that threatened their food supply; and that they responded to this threat by restructuring their diet with the assistance of stone tool technology, whose requirements for motor, process, communication, and interaction skills would later extend far beyond food-centered activities to give rise to human occupation as we know it today.

Keywords:

• Human evolution
• Food
• Tool use
• Occupational beings
• Diet

Acknowledgments

Carolyn M. Baum, PhD, OTR/L, FAOTA, Program in Occupational Therapy, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, USA

Ann Burkhardt, OTR/L, OTD, FAOTA, Bristol, Rhode Island, USA

Constance Carter, Head, Science Reference Section, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA

Yvette Hachtel, JD, MEd, OTR/L, School of Occupational Therapy, Belmont University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

Barbara Kornblau, JD, OTR/L, FAOTA, DAAPM, ABDA, CDMS, CCM, CPE, Coalition for Disability Health Equity, Washington, DC, USA

Linda Wilson, PhD, MSc, DHA, NDAET, NZROT, Otago Polytechnic, Dunedin, New Zealand