Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham

(Basic, 309 pages, $26.95)

Darwin overlooked the most crucial step in human development, says primatologist Richard Wrangham. Some 1.8 million years ago, our ape-like ancestors underwent a dramatic change in physical appearance. All at once, the gut, jaw, and teeth shrank, while the brain began expanding. Until now, the consensus theory among evolutionary anthropologists was that this new look was triggered by a shift to meat eating. But that makes no sense, says Wrangham. Ever try raw antelope? Anyone who has studied primate species that still dine only on raw food will notice that they spend several hours a day just chewing. Cooking unleashes calories far more efficiently. By taming fire for that purpose, our forebears converted themselves into the big-brained kings of the jungle.

It’s astonishing that Wrangham can find no scientist before him who’s seriously argued the same case, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. His “toothsome, skillfully prepared” brief makes the logic hard to escape. Early on, he “delivers a thorough, delightfully brutal takedown” of the contemporary raw-food movement, showing that a diet limited to uncooked foods generates an insufficient energy supply and actually stops menstruation in half of all women who try it. Even individual castaways, he documents, have needed to cook in order to survive. Wrangham is unable to cite any archaeological evidence that humans controlled fire as far back as he suggests they did, said the Hindustan Times. But “physical remnants of fire tend to degrade rapidly,” so for now, he must rely on the biological evidence.

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Still, this is “a fantastically weird way of looking at evolutionary change,” said Christine Kenneally in Slate.com. Most believers in evolution assume that changes in human biology have enabled the species’ major innovations; Wrangham is saying that the technology known as cooking changed human biology. He is also proposing that the preparation of hot meals transformed human society. Noting that women do the cooking in most every society in the world, he speculates that the “global subjugation of women” began when the first woman chose to prepare a man’s dinner in exchange for his defending the hearth. “In a book of great ideas,” pointing out that marriage might at heart be an economic pact feels like a detour into the obvious.