“I believe the transformative moment that gave rise to the genus Homo, one of the great transitions in the history of life, stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals,” Wrangham explains in his new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. “Cooking increased the (calorific) value of our food. It changed our bodies, our brains, our use of time and our social lives.” He argues, as no one else has done before, that cooking was pivotal in our evolution. “If you feed a chimp cooked food for tens of thousands of years, I find it hard to believe that it would end up looking like the same animal.”
From this, he infers that, for our ancestors, marriages of men and women were ancient pacts built around food, not sex…
Nobody, though, had ever explicitly considered that human beings might owe their spectacular success as a species to their unique propensity to cook. And, to Wrangham’s amazement, the scientific debate about how human beings started using fire had never broached the issue of cooking.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member