Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

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. More than that, Wrangham offers a provocative take on evolution—suggesting that, rather than humans creating civilized technology, civilized technology created us. It also gave rise to pair bonding and table manners, and liberated mankind from the drudgery of chewing (while chaining womankind to the stove). (June)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. . 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. Starting with Homo erectus&

"While I did enjoy reading Dr" according to Brian A. Sparr. Dr. Richard Wrangham, renowned primatologist and Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University, goes against the grain in this book with his assertion that the advent of preparing cooked meals, not merely increasing amounts of meat consumed, is the genesis of the list of extraordinary traits our ancient ancestors acquired over the last 2 million years that eventually gave rise to us, Homo sapiens.Drawing on a number of food studies, ethnographic data, as well as his own primatological research, Dr. Wrangham argues that the transition from Homo habilis to Homo erectus wo. Definitely worth a read Bill Gonch This is really a good book on an important topic that just does not get much coverage: the anthropology of food. Now, there are quite a few people who express theories on what made us human and what our distant ancestors ate. Wrangham is one of the few who combines the two topics.Put briefly that major points of his argument are as follows. The emergence of humans in their modern form (still an imperfect work in progress. in my humble opinion) requires that we explain a couple of tricky things. One is the physiological changes that separate us from earlier species of hominid and from other primat. Patrick L. Boyle said Another great book from Wrangham. This guy Wrangham is a serious scholar. He muster's a good deal of evidence for his thesis and presents it well. At one point in the early part of the book he casually mentions how a number of different African fruits taste. These are fruits not eaten by people but by chimpanzees. Apparently chimps relish fruits that humans detest. It's always nice to read a book by someone with real expertise. Who else can comment intelligently on chimp fruit?Wrangham does not specifically state this but he implies it strongly. The Atwater system of calorie counting is wrong. That's the system that tells us that

A rich and important book.” —Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma“This is a daringly unorthodox book, and one that might just transform the way we understand ourselves.” —Sunday Times (UK)“The ambition of Wrangham’s theory gives it great appeal: Cooking is a powerful biological force and the universal activity around which the rest of human history—the households and tribes, the migrations and wars, the religion and science—arranged itself. Eating cooked food, he argues, enabled us to evolve our large brains, and cook