Catching fire
Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man, the existence of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. But in Catching Fire, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham presents a startling alternative: our evolutionary success is the result of cooking. In a groundbreaking theory of our origins, Wrangham shows that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key factor in human evolution. When our ancestors adapted to using fire, humanity began. Once our hominid ancestors began cooking their food, the human digestive tract shrank and the brain grew. Time once spent chewing tough raw food could be sued instead to hunt and to tend camp. Cooking became the basis for pair bonding and marriage, created the household, and even led to a sexual division of labor. Tracing the contemporary implications of our ancestors’ diets, Catching Fire sheds new light on how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. A pathbreaking new theory of human evolution, Catching Fire will provoke controversy and fascinate anyone interested in our ancient origins—or in our modern eating habits.
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What Hacker News says
- Yeah, this books makes the case against raw diets very well:
https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0...
That's the thing with diets. There is a real well reasoned argument for and against most anything...
- Richard Wrangham wrote a great book on this https://www.amazon.co.uk/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp...
- Catching Fire, by Richard Wrangham, is a pretty good read for those interested in the impact and importance of cooking in human evolution. I really enjoyed it.
- Appears to support the thesis of "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" by Richard Wrangham https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0...
- The landing page for the paper Microbial biomarkers reveal a hydrothermally active landscape at Olduvai Gorge at the dawn of the Acheulean, 1.7 Ma [1] states:
> The geothermal activity described here may have influenced the use of the space at Olduvai Gorge and may have provided advantages, such as cooking, which has not been previously contemplated in the context of human evolution.
The discovered hydrothermal feature overlaps with the timelines of H. erectus. Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire [2] argues that the evidence for the consumption of energy dense food processed by fire is found in the physiology (small teeth, small gut, large brain) and reach (Eurasia) of erectus.
The speculation about hot spring cooking distracts from the significance of the find, in my opinion.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/09/14/2004532117
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Mad...
- This is a very good and important question. We do know the answers:
Cooking roughly doubles the nutritional value of food. The heat breaks down complex, undigestable molecules to simpler ones. It also eliminates bacteria and parasites.
Most species would benefit a lot from cooking food, if they could figure out how.
Somewhat controversial book on how fire shaped our species: https://smile.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp...
