How We Ate Ourselves To Being Human

Richard Wrangham's new book, "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" is published today by Basic Books. It was Wrangham who inspired me to write the penultimate chapter of NOT CHIMP - titled "The Ape That Domesticated Itself". Although the archaeological evidence for hearths and cooking only goes back some 800,000 years, Wrangham pulls together all we do know about the more gracile skeletons, brain size and gut size of Homo erectus to posit that cooking made calories more available from foods - specially tubers and meat - allowing guts to shrink, brains to expand, and teeth to get less massive. The advent of fires, cooking and larders would also, he argues, have led to radial social changes including long term stable relationships between men and women where women benefited from the protection of their food cache that men could afford, and men were freed up somewhat for socializing and other pursuits.