Review– Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human
Years ago during the height of the Vietnam War, I read African Genesis by anthropologist Robert Ardrey and was horrified by his notion that we evolved from killer apes — although that certainly helped me to understand and accept our thirst for war. In contrast, Richard Wrangham’s notion that we evolved from a species of ape called Homo Erectus that used fire to cook their food instead of just eating raw food is much less alarming. He introduces each chapter with an epigram that drives his thesis home like this one by Carltoon Coon: “The introduction of cooking may well have been the decisive factor in leading man from a primarily animal existence into one that was more fully human.” Wrangham explains how “catching fire” led to “family” structures wherein females of the species tended the fire, kept them burning, and cooked the meat that faithful, protective males brought “home.” The cooked diet ultimately led to changes in our physiology, including brain size, and contributed to our longevity and eventually our ability to survive as a species. Wrangham gives anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss credit for initiating this revolutionary idea. According to Strauss who wrote The Raw and the Cooked: “Cooking establishes the difference between animals and people . . . . Not only does cooking mark the transition from nature to culture, but through it and by means of it, the human state can be defined with all its attributes.” Fascinating. So we didn’t evolve from killer apes, but cooking apes. Much less disturbing.
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human
By Richard Wrangham
