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Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human Hardcover – May 26, 2009

by Richard Wrangham (Author)

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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.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Basic Books
Publication date

May 26, 2009
Grade level

11 and up
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

5.5 x 1.13 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

0465013627
ISBN-13

978-0465013623
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Contrary to the dogmas of raw-foods enthusiasts, cooked cuisine was central to the biological and social evolution of humanity, argues this fascinating study. Harvard biological anthropologist Wrangham (Demonic Males) dates the breakthrough in human evolution to a moment 1.8 million years ago, when, he conjectures, our forebears tamed fire and began cooking. Starting with Homo erectus—who should perhaps be renamed Homo gastronomicus—these innovations drove anatomical and physiological changes that make us adapted to eating cooked food the way cows are adapted to eating grass. 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. It also gave rise to pair bonding and table manners, and liberated mankind from the drudgery of chewing (while chaining womankind to the stove). 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. More than that, Wrangham offers a provocative take on evolution—suggesting that, rather than humans creating civilized technology, civilized technology created us. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Publishers Weekly
“[A] fascinating study… 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.”

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books; 1st edition (May 26, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0465013627
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0465013623
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Grade level ‏ : ‎ 11 and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.13 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,005,045 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,463 in Customs & Traditions Social Sciences
- #2,136 in Archaeology (Books)
- #5,984 in Evolution (Books)

Customer Reviews:
338 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		71%
4 star		16%
3 star		5%
2 star		5%
1 star		2%

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Top reviews from the United States

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G. Winkler

Would be good if didn't were taken by left identity politics.

Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2019

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The book was ok until the "Married cook" chapter, were the author gives us a whole ideologized account about how the patriarchy oppressed women into being the cooks of the family for the "leisure" of the men.

Not once, the author considers the reality of the men risking their lives and dying in the hunts, as the reason for the bargaining of being cooked by their women. It's just a marxist oppression regime according to the author, everything is about the power exercised by the men.

Never once, the author considered the willingness of men to take risks and actual deaths occurring until today, where more than 90% of work related deaths, are men.

It's a shame when supposedly scientific works are tainted with this kind of non-sense left leaning politics and agenda.

30 people found this helpful

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Brian A. Sparr

While I did enjoy reading Dr

Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2016

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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 would be impossible without a regular supply of cooked food. Citing the general unpalatability and undigestibility of a chimp's diet for modern humans, the seeming energy deficit seen in raw food proponents, the chemical changes that occur in foods that are cooked and the subsequent absorption of the unlocked calories, and the increasing reduction of our early ancestors' gastrointestinal tract through the millennia, he is convinced that the utilization of fire for cooking has its origins much farther in the past than the current evidence from the archaeological record tells us. The discrepancy between the archaeological record and his claim is around 1 million years, an incredibly large gap to bridge. In the latter third of the book, Wrangham makes the tangential argument that cooking is also what spurred our cultural evolution, e.g., concepts such as pair-bonding and the sexual division of labor, through the creation of a sort of "protection racket" that guards women from food thieves and ensures men a ready supply of food.

While I did enjoy reading Dr. Wrangham's book and readily admit that he makes some interesting and valid points, I am not convinced of the veracity of his hypothesis, especially in the light of more recent research on the variability and actions of the microbiome present in the digestive tracts of animals. In presenting his case for the need of cooked food for an increased energy supply in late habilines/early erectus, he ignores the fact that much of the successive change in the musculoskeletal morphology leading to our species had the effect of allowing us to conserve energy through increased efficiency of movement.

This does not necessarily mean that Dr. Wrangham is incorrect. However, the gaps in his arguments, coupled with the gaps in our own knowledge, have effectively rendered the cooking hypothesis unfalsifiable. There very well may come a time when the available physical evidence supports his position, but for now the only appropriate response is one of interest, skepticism, and further research.

46 people found this helpful

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Freebeerforall

Cooking made us human? This book is convincing

Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2018

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A well thought-out and opulently referenced text that convincingly posits that the evolution of humans from over the past 500,000 years or so was driven by the nutritional benefits that can be ascribed to cooking food. If you're interested in the development of Homo sapiens and/or the core role that cooking has played in humans not only surviving but thriving, this is well worth a read. It runs to over 300 pp but well over a third is references, notes and the index. I have to say though that insight into the Inuit diet has not sold me on overwintering in the Arctic...

9 people found this helpful

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Patrick L Boyle

Another great book from Wrangham

Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2015

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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 protein and carbohydrates yield 4 kilocalories per gram and fat 9. It also leads to the conclusion that raw food and cooked food are equal in their nutrition. This is a central point in the book. Atwater in the nineteenth century devised the procedure by which we measure the caloric value of a food article by burning it in a bomb calorimeter. This procedure is cheap and easy whereas Wrangham has to use evidence to the contrary based on measurements taken from the contents of person's colostomy bags who have eaten supervised diets. This procedure is more adequate scientifically but expensive and difficult. If you follow the simple, cheap Atwater conventions as almost everyone does then cooking hardly seems important at all. Food is food - no matter if raw or cooked. That's why Wrangham's insights will probably strike you as new.

As a primatologist Wrangham has a number of chimp anecdotes that stick with you. He points out that chimpanzees spend at least four or five hours each day just chewing. No wonder they never got around to building a civilization. Wrangham believes that <I> Homo erectus</I> emerged when they developed cooking as a way to externalize digestion thus freeing up their time and energy. Anthropology changes all the time, his specific theory may prove to have been wrong. Cooking may have arisen earlier or later than he thinks. But whatever else is subsequently learned, this is an important book.

14 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Cathy

A brave collection of ideas about cooking and human development

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 15, 2020

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This is one person's thesis about how human development was progressed by fire and cooking of meat. It goes out on a limb to some extent, disagreeing with common and accepted viewpoints but that is quite refreshing and is why this is a thesis and not a textbook. It covers quite an amount of material and ideas from how cooked food increased our brain size, how this created conjugal bonds based on mutual need, how this led to social cooperation between individuals and so forth. He ends with a rant about how this has set the scene for obesity. He draws a lot upon the animal kingdom as a reference point which is where the weakness lies in this book because essentially this book is just one man's view without evidence just logical and philosophical reasoning to justify his points. An interesting read nonetheless with some useful, yet unconventional ideas.

Carno Polo

Coquo ergo sum

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 17, 2015

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Cogito ergo sum, said Descartes. Coquo ergo sum is the gist of this book. According to largely accepted scientific knowledge, Homo erectus sprung up from the earlier Australopithecines by eating meat.The transition from homo erectus to homo sapiens, us, is owed to a major innovation: cooking.

Levi-Strauss, in his The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a science of mythology (Pimlico), wrote that fire marks the transition from nature to culture. Few would dispute that the cuisine of any nation is a major trademark of its cultural somplexity and sophistication. And cooking, in its many diverse methods (grilling, steaming, boiling, baking etc) is an essential part of any major cuisine in the world.

Our bodies evolved because we learned to cook: besides a smaller stomach and larger brain, we lost our climbing ability (no need to climb if fire can protect camp on the ground) in favor of better running skills. And we have much smaller teeth compared to our ancestors who did not cook.

Cooking also played an essential role in making mankind a carnivore, as it makes it efficient to digest and store large amount of animal proteins in a way that would have been unthinkable with just raw meat. But for vegetarians there is some consolation as well: cooking made it possible to digest many more types of roots.

Finally, this book dwelves on the social implications of cooking: how it shaped the man/woman relationship in the house, and how it made it easier to use meals as a social event. Some cultures have peculiar (to us) habits: among the Bonerif of Papua, a woman will sleep with every man in the village except her brothers before finally getting married; but the moment she feeds a man she is irrevocably considered his wife!

2 people found this helpful

andyhb

Excellent Popular Science

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 3, 2019

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Highly recommended book. An excellent proposition well presented and argued. Wrangham has the happy knack of writing scientifically robust work while retaining a very accessible style for the non-specialist.

I'd recommend this book first, then "Demonic Males" followed by "The Goodness Paradox" - I feel it presents the subject in the most logical order.

Samantha Wallace

Interesting take on human's early origins

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 3, 2017

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Overall I enjoyed this book. However, at times it read like an undergraduate's essay in as much as there was a lot of cited information but didn't seem to develop into a coherent argument. The author would quote some research and then a little later quote something else which seemed a contradiction, without giving the chapter the structure of a for and against debate. This occurred more than once throughout the book. Also, I felt that the term habalines really should have been better explained earlier in the book.
Overall, an enjoyable and informative read, I'd really like to give 4.5 stars or 9/10 for this book.

One person found this helpful

oxfoodblog

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 7, 2012

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Considering the evolution of humans in the context of food and cooking is a fascinating subject. Why do we eat the foods we do, as opposed to the food chimpanzees eat? How did we develop cooking, and what effect did it have on our morphological development? Why do we like the flavours of the foods we do? `Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human` examines the hypothesis that it was actually the development of cooking which was a major evolutionary transition. The physical composition of cooked food is different from that of raw food, changing the costs of digestion like chewing, resulting in different developments in humans, like smaller jawbones than chimpanzees. Similarly, the way societies evolved, and the community structure we have is based around the collection and distribution of food. There were a lot of key advances in human society due to culinary developments, and `Catching Fire' is one of the few books I have seen that looks at them.

Perhaps more of a popular science book than a food book, you won't find any recipes or many applications of the evolutionary ideas to modern day cooking. But you will find a good amount of theory- well sourced and ideas clearly explained- concerning our culinary development. I might have hoped for a little more detail in developing the ideas, and perhaps some discussion of how these ideas affect our gastronomy today- the book has a large font and, without the `notes' sections, only totals around 200 pages. There are many interesting examples for each idea presented, looking at tribes which developed society independently of ours. Overall, there are a lot of good ideas presented, and it's worth a read, from both a science and a culinary perspective. 8/10.

One person found this helpful

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