Introduction

A Taste of What Made Us Human.

We all know cooking food has immense historical, cultural and social significance.  There are a myriad of publications and pop media (from “The Joy of Cooking” to “Iron Chef” on the Food Network) about it, professions developed around it, and passions exploring and exploiting it. Much of our universal culture hinges on our preparation and consumption of edible substances. Yet this simple act is often over-looked in our daily lives, and perhaps even more so, in our evolutionary history.

In his book “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human,” Richard Wrangham, a renowned primatologist and anthropology professor at Harvard University, explores how cooking doesn’t just enrich the human experience, but possibly created it. “Cooking increased the value of our food. It changed our bodies, our brains, our use of time and our social lives,” (Wrangham, 2009). In the introduction to his book, Wrangham looks for the dietary stimuli to major morphological changes in our evolutionary time line. Specifically, Wrangham and many of his contemporaries are interested in the evolutionary transition that took place between 1.9 and 1.8 million years ago, when Homo habilis gave way to Homo erectus.  If the transition to a more carnivorous diet may have facilitated the rise of the genus Homo from our Australopithecine ancestors, Wrangham hypothesizes, then there must be a second, different impetus that made Homo erectus so successful. Could it have been the advent of cooking?

There are many arguments (Wrangham’s included) that seek to link the increased nutritional value of cooked found with evolutionary encephalization. Cooking meat makes proteins easier to absorb, and increases the amount of energy actually digested and processed by the consumer (Leung, 2011). Likewise, tough fibrous vegetables are broken down; cooking softens the plant cell walls, and once this roughage is chewed it is much easier to digest (Brahic, 2010). In comparison with other primates like chimpanzees, humans consume a relatively low amount of indigestible fibers (30% compared to 10% respectively), according to Wrangham in an interview with Townsend (2006). The extra caloric uptake from more easily digestible food maybe have allowed early humans to travel further, grow taller, and develop a larger proportion of energy-expensive organs (like big brains), states Wrangham in the same interview. Also, at the end of their linage, the robust Australopithecines had massive masticatory muscles, large anterior teeth and jaws capable of high-bite forces (Strait, 2010). Early members of the genus Homo on the other hand developed smaller teeth, more delicate jaws and flatter faces (Townsend, 2006). In his book, Wrangham explores the role of cooking in the morphological, social, and cultural developments that occurred between the Australopithecines and modern Homo sapiens. In this blog, I will be exploring and further expanding upon each topic he brings up, chapter by chapter. So grab a torch, catch the fire, and come along.

References:

Brahic, C. 2010. Chew on this: thank cooking for your big brain. The New Scientist 207: 1-12

Leung, W. 2011. How cooking may have affected human evolution. The Globe and Mail. 

Strait, D. 2010. The Evolutionary History of the Australopiths. Evo Edu Outreach. 3:341-352.

Townsend, E. 2006. The cooking ape: an interview with Richard Wrangham. Gastonomica. 5: 29-37.

Wrangham, R. 2009. Catching fire: how cooking made us human. New York: Basics Books.