The Cooking Apes

I was fortunate to finally get a hold of a copy of Richard Wrangham's marvelous study in human origins, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. It's a slim volume, and a recommended read for anyone interested in accounts of how we got here that do not include talking snakes. Whereas control of fire and the "civilized" custom of eating cooked food have long been held as the innovations of a clever primate that occured after we developed our big brains, Wrangham demonstrates why, in fact, the reverse is true---our big brains and civilized nature were made possible in the first place principally by just these two uniquely human activities.

"So what is this? More 'Just So' stories from the adaptionist peanut gallery?"

Hardly. The author assembles such an array of mutually reinforcing evidence from multiple fields of study that the reader is left with an impression that the core of his thesis should have been obvious all along. By the standard that the measure of a scientific proposition is the difference between what it explains and what is required to explain it, Wrangham's cooking hypothesis ranks among the best theories we have on what kindled the rapid rise of our species from a chimp-like ancestor, and makes us so different from living apes today.

Read this book.

Coquimus, Ergo Sumus

Richard Wrangham is a British anthropologist and primatologist who has been teaching at Harvard for 20 years. His new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, which comes out in May, makes a compelling case that the way to humanity was through the stomach. Wrangham noticed that chimpanzees, for instance, can range all day and find little of nutritional value. Indeed, much of their waking lives are spent chewing up really shitty food.

But once our ancestors got hold of fire, and cooked foods as a staple of their diet, less energy spent digesting made room for bigger brains, smaller teeth and guts, and the ultimate rise of the lean, striding animal that replaced chimp-like austrolopithicines. Wrangham evokes the image of communal cooking fires as centers of social development. It puts a whole new poignancy into telling tales around the campfire.

Another theory, the "running man" model---which has been treated on this page---also relies on nutrition as a key element, and finds no rival here. The two, in fact, could be viewed as complimentary. Wrangham's theory even purports to make a prediction of sorts. In order for his theory to stand, use of fire would have to stretch back nearly two million years, well beyond even the most remote archaeological estimates. Of sites that demonstrate earlier use, Wrangham says, "We'll get them."



I tend to think of language and art as early human technologies. Excellent theoretical modeling has been done to show how these innovations were not incidental but key to our evolution. The mastery of fire and developmental doors opened by cooking round the picture out nicely.