Sunday, May 31, 2009

Catching Fire

Here's a NY Times review of Richard Wrangham's book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Wrangham puts forth the idea that the harnessing of fire and eating cooked food played major roles in humans evolving to what we are today.

I haven't quite seen this idea expressed before, and I'm quite interested in obtaining this book.

For an except, see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/books/excerpt-catching-fire.html?_r=1&ref=books. Here's a tidbit:

Our ancestors therefore responded to the advent of cooking by biologically adapting to cooked food. Cooking re-shaped our anatomy, physiology, ecology, life-history, psychology and society. Signals in our bodies indicate that this dependence arose not just some tens of thousands of years ago, or even a few hundred thousand, but right back at the beginning of our time on earth; at the start of human evolution, by the habiline that became Homo erectus. ...

Claudia Dreifus spoke with Wrangham: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/science/21conv.html?ref=books.

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