You are what you cook
Physically, humans are an anomaly in the Great Ape family. Yes, there’s the walking upright and large brain stuff, but what about the things that the other Apes rely on for their survival? Such as hairy skin to keep them warm. Or powerful jaws to crush and chew plants and flesh.
About a decade ago Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham and others developed an hypothesis about the role of fire, and particularly of the cooking of food, in human evolution. It is an intriguing idea which helps to explain these apparent anomalies – and much more.
Wranham has now published a book: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. It’s a fascinating read and is thoroughly convincing. When I heard some commentator call it a “new theory of human evolution” my sceptical hackles rose, but Wranham claims, probably quite accurately, “What is extraordinary about this simple claim is that it is new”.
In essence, our path from ape to modern human ago began about two million years ago when our ancestor Homo Erectus emerged knowing how to control fire and heat food. Eating cooked food – at first tubers and other plants and later meat – made digestion easier, leading to selection for smaller guts. Cooked food takes less energy to digest and provides more energy for the amount consumed. This extra energy could then have been used to power larger, energy sucking brains.
The extra energy gave the first cooks biological advantages. They survived and reproduced better than before. Their genes spread. Their bodies responded by biologically adapting to cooked food, shaped by
natural selection to take maximum advantage of the new diet. There were changes in anatomy, physiology, ecology, life history, psychology and society.
Of course fire would explain our relatively hairless skins which gave us the advantage of greater temperature control allowing us to endure long periods of physical exertion – such as hunting – without overheating. There is also the argument that fire allowed us to evolve into more social, calmer beings.
Humans in all cultures and all locations cook their food. Wranham cites studies that show that we cannot survive on uncooked food, and by extension, neither could our ancestors. As an example, one study shows that 50 percent of women on an all-raw food diet stop menstruating. Among the list of ills that befall those on raw diets are back and hip problem, and frequent urination.
But their is a darker side effect too: male authority over women. Marriage, or as Wranham calls it, “a primitive protection racket”, is really a means to protect lone (female) cooks from hungry (male) thieves.
Relying on cooked food creates opportunities for cooperation, but just as important, it exposes cooks to being exploited. Cooking takes time, so lone cooks cannot easily guard their wares from determined thieves such as hungry males without their own food.
A male-dominated culture with women trapped in a subservient role – from cooking? I am always a bit leery of evolution “just-so” stories, but Wranham presents his postulations in a nuanced and convincingly rational way. As Edward O. Wilson said, “In this thoroughly researched and marvelously well written book,
Richard Wrangham has convincingly supplied a missing piece in the
evolutionary origin of humanity.” I can’t argue with that.
It seems that the anomaly is that we have small mouths. Yes, us load, big-mouthed creatures. Says Wrangham: “They could equally well call us the small-mouthed ape.”
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