Catching fire
by Richard W. Wrangham · first published 2009
10mentions
3recommended by
9HN commenters
2010–2022first – last mentioned
33% recommend67% neutral
Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man, the existence of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. But in Catching Fire, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham presents a startling alternative: our evolutionary success is the result of cooking. In a groundbreaking theory of our origins, Wrangham shows that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key factor in human evolution. When our ancestors adapted to using fire, humanity began. Once our hominid ancestors began cooking their food, the human digestive tract shrank and the brain grew. Time once spent chewing toug
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Yeah, this books makes the case against raw diets very well: https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0... That's the thing with diets. There is a real well reasoned argument for and against most anything...
on “Gut Germs Appear to Play Role in Multiple Sclerosis” ↗Catching Fire, by Richard Wrangham, is a pretty good read for those interested in the impact and importance of cooking in human evolution. I really enjoyed it.
on “Chimps understand concept of cooking” ↗Richard Wrangham wrote a great book on this https://www.amazon.co.uk/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp...
on “How cooking vegetables changed humanity 10,000 years ago” ↗From, uh, 2013. And the book, Catching Fire, mentioned in the article and from which most of the info is gleaned is from 2010. The scholar in the article, Richard Wrangham, wrote the book. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari doesn't push the domestication…
on “Why Fire Makes Us Human” ↗…eliminates bacteria and parasites. Most species would benefit a lot from cooking food, if they could figure out how. Somewhat controversial book on how fire shaped our species: https://smile.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp...
on “Did our early ancestors boil their food in hot springs?” ↗…http://img2.tapuz.co.il/forums/1_140989346.pdf http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/06.13/01-cooking.ht... http://evolutionaryanthropology.duke.edu/uploads/assets/Wobb... http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/04... http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/articles/RW%20RC%20Ev%20... I was very surprised when I saw the early dates (before the emergence of Homo sapiens as a species) for the…
on “Evidence that human ancestors used fire one million years ago” ↗…advantages, such as cooking, which has not been previously contemplated in the context of human evolution. The discovered hydrothermal feature overlaps with the timelines of H. erectus. Richard Wrangham’s book Catching Fire [2] argues that the evidence for the consumption of energy dense food processed by fire is found in the physiology (small teeth, small gut, large brain) and reach (Eurasia) of erectus. The speculation…
on “Did our early ancestors boil their food in hot springs?” ↗Appears to support the thesis of "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" by Richard Wrangham https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0...
on “Evidence found that man was not the first being to master fire” ↗…actually spoke to 2 separate anthropologists who had different views about our evolutionary diet and he chose to weave them into his own narrative. The second anthropologist, Richard Wrangham wrote the book "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" and as you can see below he strongly contradicts the notion that we ate much raw meat http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/books/27garn.html?_r=1&... Instead of writing about…
on “Meat based diets made us smarter” ↗Richard Wrangham wrote a book on this "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human"
on “No One Knows Why Humans Can Walk” ↗