Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham presents the theory that a shift from raw to cooked foods during hominid evolution had profound physical and social effects that led to the development of modern humans. I approached this book with some skepticism, being disinclined to accept single-cause explanations, and I couldn’t read the chapter title “How Cooking Frees Men” without a jaundiced eye. But Wrangham amasses quite a bit of information in support of his theory, and he provides a balanced view of the tradeoffs involved, especially for women, in the move toward dependence on cooked foods. Whether or not one accepts cooking as the single most crucial innovation in human evolution, this book is worth including among the readings in a human evolution course. Sorayya Carr, UPB partner, anthropologist.
Sorayya — I read a review of Catching fire and another book (I think in the NYRB) that speculated that cooking with fire advanced human evolution by the need for women to put down their babies while cooking with fire, causing an advance in language by the attempt to reassure their anxious and noisy babies through increasingly complex sounds rather than contact, a kind of motherese, perhaps a beginning of our mother tongue.
UPB has a copy of Marion Levy’s OUR MOTHER-TEMPER, which may touch on the same phenomena. Bill McClung
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[...]Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham (Basic Books, 2009). « University Press Books[...]…