Book Review: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham

One-line summary: Presents the thesis that control of fire was not merely a side effect of our evolution, but an essential component of it; humans have evolved to eat cooked food.



Reviews:

Goodreads: Average: 3.65. Mode: 4 stars.
Amazon: Average: 4.1. Mode: 5 stars.

Until two million years ago, our ancestors were apelike beings the size of chimpanzees. Then Homo erectus was born and we became human. What caused this extraordinary transformation?

In this stunningly original book, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham argues that cooking created the human race. 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 labor. As our ancestors adapted to using fire, humans emerged as “the cooking apes.”

A groundbreaking new theory of evolution, Catching Fire offers a startlingly original argument about how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today

( A good book of interest to anyone interested in evolution, nutrition, and food science. The author is a primatologist, so expect a LOT of monkey studies. )

Verdict: Recommended for anyone with an interest in evolution and/or food science. Wrangham's thesis is revolutionary, but not in a crackpot "This changes everything we thought we knew" way. Rather, it challenges some basic assumptions about how we evolved without denying any of the existing evidence. His arguments are mostly quite strong, and while to my knowledge, some anthropologists have challenged his assumptions about when humans started using fire, there have not yet been any serious challenges to his conclusions from an evolutionary perspective.

Book Review: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham

One-line summary: Presents the thesis that control of fire was not merely a side effect of our evolution, but an essential component of it; humans have evolved to eat cooked food.



Reviews:

Goodreads: Average: 3.65. Mode: 4 stars.
Amazon: Average: 4.1. Mode: 5 stars.

Until two million years ago, our ancestors were apelike beings the size of chimpanzees. Then Homo erectus was born and we became human. What caused this extraordinary transformation?

In this stunningly original book, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham argues that cooking created the human race. 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 labor. As our ancestors adapted to using fire, humans emerged as “the cooking apes.”

A groundbreaking new theory of evolution, Catching Fire offers a startlingly original argument about how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today

( A good book of interest to anyone interested in evolution, nutrition, and food science. The author is a primatologist, so expect a LOT of monkey studies. )

Verdict: Recommended for anyone with an interest in evolution and/or food science. Wrangham's thesis is revolutionary, but not in a crackpot "This changes everything we thought we knew" way. Rather, it challenges some basic assumptions about how we evolved without denying any of the existing evidence. His arguments are mostly quite strong, and while to my knowledge, some anthropologists have challenged his assumptions about when humans started using fire, there have not yet been any serious challenges to his conclusions from an evolutionary perspective.