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Summary
Summary
In this stunningly original book, Richard Wrangham argues that it was cooking that caused the extraordinary transformation of our ancestors from apelike beings to Homo erectus. At the heart of Catching Fire lies an explosive new idea: The habit of eating cooked rather than raw food permitted the digestive tract to shrink and the human brain to grow, helped structure human society, and created the male-female division of labour. As our ancestors adapted to using fire, humans emerged as "the cooking apes". Covering everything from food-labelling and overweight pets to raw-food faddists, Catching Fire offers a startlingly original argument about how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. "This notion is surprising, fresh and, in the hands of Richard Wrangham, utterly persuasive ... Big, new ideas do not come along often in evolution these days, but this is one." -Matt Ridley, author of Genome
Author Notes
Richard Wrangham is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University and Curator of Primate Behavioural Biology at the Peabody Museum. He is the co-author of Demonic Males and co-editor of Chimpanzee Cultures. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Contrary to the dogmas of raw-foods enthusiasts, cooked cuisine was central to the biological and social evolution of humanity, argues this fascinating study. Harvard biological anthropologist Wrangham (Demonic Males) dates the breakthrough in human evolution to a moment 1.8 million years ago, when, he conjectures, our forebears tamed fire and began cooking. Starting with Homo erectus-who should perhaps be renamed Homo gastronomicus-these innovations drove anatomical and physiological changes that make us "adapted to eating cooked food" the way "cows are adapted to eating grass." By making food more digestible and easier to extract energy from, Wrangham reasons, cooking enabled hominids' jaws, teeth and guts to shrink, freeing up calories to fuel their expanding brains. It also gave rise to pair bonding and table manners, and liberated mankind from the drudgery of chewing (while chaining womankind to the stove). Wrangham's lucid, accessible treatise ranges across nutritional science, paleontology and studies of ape behavior and hunter-gatherer societies; the result is a tour de force of natural history and a profound analysis of cooking's role in daily life. More than that, Wrangham offers a provocative take on evolution-suggesting that, rather than humans creating civilized technology, civilized technology created us. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Tracing the evolution of humans from their ape predecessors presents a number of puzzles. Although chimpanzees eat meat when the opportunity avails, humans are the only primates who are committed carnivores, the only primates who gather meat from other larger animals. Moreover, only man discovered and controlled fire. And this fire enabled humans to cook. Cooked food is more easily digested, and cooking neutralizes many pathogens. Of even greater importance, cooked food empowers the body to absorb more energy. One of the first to note this, the famous gourmet Brillat-Savarin appreciated the importance of cooking in human evolution more than did Darwin. Only recently has the broader evolutionary role of cooking revealed itself. As the breadth of his bibliography attests, Wrangham has amassed biological, sociological, and archaeological data to identify when in prehistory cooking first appeared and how it also helped to define human social organization. I cook; therefore, I am.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2009 Booklist
Choice Review
Biological anthropologist Wrangham (Harvard) believes that cooking made us human. He argues, following L. C. Aiello and P. Wheeler's "expensive tissue hypothesis" (1995 Current Anthropology 36: 199-221), that reducing the gut was necessary for the brain to enlarge, but he attributes most of the reduction to cooking rather than to meat. Not only does cooking reduce the toughness of meat, it also renders vegetable foods more digestible. Cooking also led to the division of labor between males and females and the development of the human nuclear family, in which males provided protection for the food and the females who prepared it in return for priority access to that food. Wrangham's argument is fascinating, but much of his evidence is anecdotal; hopefully, this book will spur others to more fully investigate the relationships he proposes. Wrangham also attributes just about everything human to cooking, which stretches its influence too far. However, this lively book provides much food for thought. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. L. L. Johnson Vassar College