Your mum was right – eat fish because it’s good for the brain. There’s a suggestion that early humans living along the South African coast and consequently eating lots of fish were more intelligent than humans living inland living off meat and veggies.
And women, because they ate a great deal more shellfish than men – after all they were the gatherers – were probably brighter than their menfolk.
Ichthyologist Professor Mike Bruton (ichthyology being the study of fish) who is now a generalist dedicated to promoting science, recently gave a talk about fish and brains in Cape Town.
He focused his talk on studies by an archaeologist – Professor John Parkington at UCT. Parkington suggested that fish – especially shellfish – because they provide an important nutrient for the brain, led to the emergence of the first really intelligent humans.
He studied pre-historic hunter-gatherer people living along the West Coast, where one finds the world’s largest middens of discarded shells. He is looking at a time that began before humans migrated from Africa.
Mike Bruton says big-brained humans took a different route in evolution to that of other large mammals. Interpreting Parkington, he described how “we invested in the process of developing a large brain and skull to contain it”.
As an animal’s body gets bigger the brain gets bigger, though not at the same rate. A large but not terribly bright mammal like a rhino typically has a brain about 0.4 percent of the body weight.
Humans broke the rule by having a large body AND a large brain – about 2 percent of our body weight.
Our coastal ancestors had access to a high quality food to feed their brains – fish.
Brain development is driven by what a pregnant mother eats and while she is breast-feeding her baby.
And the key nutrients needed are polyunsaturated fatty acids (Pufas) without which “children are irremediably mentally and visually disadvantaged”.
Pufas are uncommon in terrestrial animals such as antelope but very common in marine and freshwater fish and shellfish.
Bruton says coastal women habitually gathered and ate large amounts of shellfish, while men wasted their time and energy hunting down sirloins and chops that provided few nutrients for brain development.
Seafood allowed Homo erectus(the species that preceded our own Homo sapiens) to accelerate brain development, so infusing the human race with a greater intelligence, allowing them to eventually become rocket scientists and their children to send SMSes to each other simply by using their thumbs.
It seems to be no coincidence that the world’s earliest signs of humans engaging in creative activities – making decorative necklaces, water vessels and advanced stone artifacts – are along the Cape coast.
So it wasn’t simply beetle-browed humans that migrated from Africa, it was intelligent humans. Parkington once held aloft an apple and a perlemoen shell and said Homo sapiens(“man the wise”) “probably came about not in some Middle East orchard, but on a Cape beach”.
Gonzales, the fishmonger, would agree with all this.
A customer who marvelled at how quick-witted and intelligent he was asked him: “What makes you so clever Mr Gonzales?”
Gonzales said, “Fish heads. Eat enough and you’ll be positively brilliant. Only R30 apiece.”
The customer bought three. A week later he complained they were disgusting and he didn’t feel any smarter.
“You didn’t eat enough,” said Gonzales. The customer went home with 20 more. Two weeks later he was back – and angry.
“Hey, Gonzales,” he said, “you’re selling me fish heads for R30 a piece when I can buy the whole fish for that. You’re ripping me off!”
“You see?” said Gonzales. “You’re smarter already!”