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Overview
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by the primatologist Richard Wrangham, was published in 2009. Wrangham argues that cooking food, not just eating meat, drove the major changes in human evolution that appear with Homo erectus, including smaller teeth and guts and a larger brain. The book is a clear example of a bold hypothesis that remains debated.
Context
Wrangham studies wild chimpanzees and compares their feeding to human diets. Before his book, many researchers linked brain growth to meat eating and stone tools. Wrangham proposed that cooking made food softer and richer in usable energy, which changed the body and the social life of early humans. The evidence for early fire use is the main point of dispute.
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Curator's notes
- Why it matters
- how cooking made us human.
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