Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. Wrangham delivers a brilliant argument to back his theory. The more puzzling question is why didn't anyone else came up with this argument all these years? May be, it was self-evident in hindsight.
- Cooking made our digestion more efficient, which in turn helped the brain "growth".
- Cooking gave humans free time to hunt and build social relationships (did Neanderthal cook?).
- Cooking strengthens the nuptial bond (yes, there is irony to this).
- Fire protected us from predators and helped us sleep on ground (explains the human population explosion)
- And more theories (epi-genetics?)
As physiologist Peter Wheeler has long argued, this may be why humans are “naked apes”: a reduction in hair would have allowed Homo erectus to avoid becoming overheated on the hot savanna. But Homo erectus could have lost their hair only if they had an alternative system for maintaining body heat at night. Fire offers that system. Once our ancestors controlled fire, they could keep warm even when they were inactive. The benefit would have been high: by losing their hair, humans would have been better able to travel long distances during hot periods, when most animals are inactive.
They could then run for long distances in pursuit of prey or to reach carcasses quickly. By allowing body hair to be lost, the control of fire allowed extended periods of running to evolve, and made humans better able to hunt or steal meat from other predators.
I think, the more important question is how and not why we started cooking. We probably will never have the answer to that since our imagination fails to surpass that freak accident theory.
Well.. now that we moved out of Savannas and started gorging smorgasbord of processed food; a thousand years from now, WALL*E might write a book titled - Catching Slack: How Not Cooking Made Us Automatons.
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