Book description
In this stunningly original book, Richard Wrangham argues that it was
cooking that caused the extraordinary transformation of our ancestors
from apelike beings to Homo erectus. At the heart of Catching Fire lies
an explosive new idea: the habit of eating cooked rather than raw food
permitted the digestive tract to shrink and the human brain to grow,
helped structure human society, and created the male-female division of
labour. As our ancestors adapted to using fire, humans emerged as
"the cooking apes". Covering everything from food-labelling
and overweight pets to raw-food faddists, Catching Fire offers a
startlingly original argument about how we came to be the social,
intelligent, and sexual species we are today. This notion is surprising,
fresh and, in the hands of Richard Wrangham, utterly persuasive ... Big,
new ideas do not come along often in evolution these days, but this is
one. -Matt Ridley, author of Genome In this stunningly original book,
Richard Wrangham argues that it was cooking that caused the
extraordinary transformation of our ancestors from apelike beings to
Homo erectus. At the heart of Catching Fire lies an explosive new idea:
the habit of eating cooked rather than raw food permitted the digestive
tract to shrink and the human brain to grow, helped structure human
society, and created the male-female division of labour. As our
ancestors adapted to using fire, humans emerged as "the cooking
apes". Covering everything from food-labelling and overweight pets
to raw-food faddists, Catching Fire offers a startlingly original
argument about how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual
species we are today. This notion is surprising, fresh and, in the hands
of Richard Wrangham, utterly persuasive ... Big, new ideas do not come
along often in evolution these days, but this is one. -Matt Ridley,
author of Genome
