Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire

Food: the most necessary supplement to life. There are few experiences that can best biting into a perfectly grilled steak, or savoring the first bite of a warm apple pie. In times of low energy, these dishes and many others step up perfectly to reinvigorate the tired person. Why, then, for most of history, has food been consumed raw? Richard Wrangham explores the notion of cooking and how it led to the evolution of the hominin ancestors into modern humans in his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. In it he addresses many questions and theories about his hypothesis. Some of the more important ones are the influence of food on inter-birth interval, the avoidance of starvation by Homo sapiens ancestors, our ancestors’ loss of body hair, and the influence of Darwinian selection for social tolerance and cooperation. Wrangham’s hypothesis provides answers for these and other questions throughout his book. Wrangham opens his book pondering a deep question: what made us human? He then states that the Homo genus “stemmed from the control of fire and the advent …show more content…
Man-the-Hunter does not address this significant portion of food supply, which leaves holes in this hypothesis. Wrangham notes that the australopithecines lacked the physical capability to gather large amounts of food at one time. According to him, the first step towards modern humans was the transformation of the australopithecines into the habilines, Homo habilis. This transformation seems to have stemmed from meat eating. But a second, bigger, step led the habilines to become Homo erectus. Wrangham theorizes that the advent of fire led to the evolution. (Wrangham 8) This explains the smaller teeth and jaws of H. erectus, and the decreased sagittal crest and masseter