Highlights of things that caught my eye from this Smithsonian article:

• “there is no strong relationship between eating more meat and the evolution of larger brains in our ancestors.” [sorry, Liver King] But learning to cook meat was probably important. We knew how to make and control fire for hundreds of thousands of years before we started using it for cooking, probably starting with fish.
• Beer is about as old as agriculture, with the oldest known examples originating in Egypt. “Dating to 5,800 years ago, hundreds of years before Egypt’s first pharaoh, this beer was thick like a porridge rather than watery and probably used for both daily consumption and ritual purposes.” [Sounds like alcoholic oatmeal, and maybe not so delicious, but it fits with the idea of beer as a basic food.]
• Dogs came from wolves, which we know, but the precise group of wolves serving as the genetic ancestor of modern dogs has not been found [aliens?].
• The earliest known chicken domestication occurred in modern-day Thailand, and again is about as old as agriculture.
• One of the oldest “possible hominims” (6-7 million years) was identified in modern day Chad. They could walk, but based on their bodies still spent a lot of time in trees. [Stop the planet of the apes, I want to get off!]
• Modern humans and Neanderthals were both around in modern-day Europe as long as 50,000 years ago, meaning they co-existed and interbred for longer than previously thought. The Nobel Prize went to a scientist who sequenced the Neanderthal genome in 2010.
• Chimpanzees and gorillas sometimes hang out and let their children play together in the wild.
• Evidence of successful limb amputations (meaning the patients lived) predates agriculture. This might seem gross, but is evidence of “advanced medical knowledge”.
• Humans have more genetic defenses against dementia than other animals, and this may have resulted somewhat by accident thanks to genes that evolved to cope with gonorrhea.

Troy McClure was Phil Hartman. Rest in peace, Phil Hartman.