Catching Fire

How Cooking Made Us Human

By: Richard Wrangham

Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau

Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

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 tough raw food could be used instead to hunt and to tend camp. Cooking became the basis for pair bonding and marriage, created the household, and even led to a sexual division of labor.

Tracing the contemporary implications of our ancestors diets, Catching Fire sheds new light on how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. A pathbreaking new theory of human evolution, Catching Fire will provoke controversy and fascinate anyone interested in our ancient origins - or in our modern eating habits.

©2009 Richard Wrangham (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

• Top 10 Books of 2009 (Dwight Garner, The New York Times)

• Books of the Year 2009 (The Economist)

"[A] fascinating study...Wrangham's lucid, accessible treatise ranges across nutritional science, Paleontology and studies of ape behavior and hunter-gatherer societies; the result is a tour de force of natural history and a profound analysis of cooking's role in daily life." ( Publishers Weekly)

" Catching Fire is convincing in argument and impressive in its explanatory power. A rich and important book." (Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma)

Fire necessary for survival for 2 millions years

Any additional comments?

Thoroughly convincing that humans can not and could not survive without fire. Humans can not be human without it. Homo Habilis seems to have done all the heavy lifting in getting us from smart-ape to the modern form of human (at least from the neck down) about 2 million years ago. Homo Habilis seems to have started the stone age and learned to control fire and cook. What an accomplishment!

Next came Homo Erectus about 1.8 million years ago. If you put a Homo Erectus in a business suit and saw him on a bus in Manhattan, you might not look twice. From the neck down he would look completely normal. He'd be a little freakish looking from the neck up. But with a hat and sunglasses.... Behaviorally, however, he might be very unpredictable and dangerous. I digress.I feel I learned a great deal about humanity from this book. And the information contained here would be hard for a layman to obtain from any other source. It appears that the conclusions reached in this book have provoked some dischord by upending human development timelines from archeology. This new synthesis pushes the use of fire back about a million years. That's rocking the boat. How much fun is that!

Interesting read

Makes some pretty big assumptions about the causes for the evolution of certain physiological structures such as small teeth and male-female social structures but overall interesting book

Fascinating book about early human development...

This is a fascinating book that makes for great listening. One measure of a good book is how much I tell others about it. After listening to Wrangham's book about the effect of cooking on human development, I find myself mentioning it to all my friends and acquaintences (my family is probably sick of hearing about raw food diets, and the unappreciated effects of cooking on food and culture). In addition to those interested in early human development, this book also renders useful information about the dangers of today's hyper-processed foods (mostly obesity). Highly recommended. Great content and good narrator.

Food science and evolution, two great tastes

Wrangham's thesis is that fire is what made modern humans. We didn't just learn to use fire because we were so smart: using fire actually gave us an evolutionary advantage which led to our being smart. In a nutshell: cooked food is more nutritious and easier to eat, thus allowing our evolutionary ancestors to acquire more calories for less effort, increasing their survival and also freeing up more time for things like inventing the wheel.

At first this may seem counter-intuitive, but Wrangham makes a convincing case, talking about the speed of evolution and how it's plausible that humans could indeed have evolved as a result of our control of fire, which Wrangham dates back to (possibly) up to a quarter of a million years ago. He talks about the physiology of chewing and digestion, how our australopithicene ancestors differed from us in how they ate, and crucial differences between human diets and monkey diets. Lots of talk about how the body handles cooked meat and vegetables differently than raw meat and vegetables. All of this is fascinating and convincing.

I think the second part of the book is weaker, as Wrangham goes into evolutionary psychology, which as usual involves a lot of speculation but without much evidence. Many of the later chapters felt a bit padded, like he had an obligation to bring in a social and cultural dimension to the argument. This I found less convincing -- we get a lot of talk about how cooking and food preparation shakes out in "primitive" societies, but this is all dealing with homo sapiens in our modern state. It's somewhat interesting but I don't think it really contributes much to his central thesis, which is supported strongly enough by the physical evidence.

Overall, a good food science and physical anthropology book.

Recommended for: Fans of evolution, monkeys, and cooked food.
Not recommended for: Creationists, vegans, or raw foodists.

Interesting book - but a little long

This was an interesting book - but a little long and repetitive... bottom-line is women cook and we all gain weight.

Interesting,but also a tad repetitive

The author has some very interesting observations about the nutritional differences between raw food and cooked food, the adaption of the human mouth and digestive system to cooked food, and some provocative theories on how cooking influences gender-based roles and inequalities in society. It's certainly a thought-provoking work, even if I don't agree with some of the conclusions he's drawing from his evidence.

However, I am finding that the frequent repetition of facts and theories, coupled with the narrator's oddly-paced and rather wooden style, more than a little off-putting. The audiobook runs a bit less than seven hours, but at about six hours in, it feels like I've been listening to it a lot longer!

Not what I expected

For all that the book was interesting but much more “scientific & technical “ than I expected. Learned more than I really wanted about digestion and the story about the man’s open stomach was something that couldn’t happen now

Understanding Humans

I couldn’t put this book down, as they say. I’m always talking about how cooking is love;
how kids always remember the neighborhood moms or grandmas who cooked great food; how you can smell the foods of fond memories,
and how, when you hear about survival stories, the survivors often have such vivid memories surrounding cooking, or meals with family or specific foods they remember and food traditions, etc. Now I know why. A big thank you to the author and narrator-I will listen again and probably again!

Undercooked

I approached this book with optimism. It's an interesting, perhaps persuasive, argument by someone who knows what he's talking about. What could go wrong?

To be fair, I would have been much more impressed if the book had been published 25 years ago. Today it reads like a blog post: good ideas, relatively well written, but short on detailed evidence.

Post-post-modernism and post-internet, that just isn't good enough. Today, every fledgling new scientific idea has to fight for its life in the blogosphere against all kinds of criticism, both well- and ill-informed, before gaining much acceptance. Scientists, as a group, have also lost a good deal of the moral authority they once had. Readers are beginning to realize that what a scientist writes isn't always good science -- or science at all -- and we automatically try to identify and compensate for the writer's personal agenda as soon as we're past the title page.

This makes Wrangham's Paleolithic Cook Book look a little under-done. Sure, the idea that cooking was instrumental in turning habilenes into modern humans is attractive; but cool ideas aren't enough. Wrangham includes some interesting comparative physiology (humans have unreasonably small guts), and that's a strong point. However, his argument that we traded guts for brains is more or less pure speculation -- to say nothing of all the social psychology he attempts to extract from this observation. Wrangham relies a good deal on hunter-gatherer ethnology, but it's all anecdotal. Plus, that kind of anthropology has never recovered from its politicized self-immolation after the Chagnon/Yanomamo controversy and carries little weight today.

The discussion of human evolution is weak. If, for example, Neanderthals really developed the advanced cooking techniques he ascribes to them, and if cooking is really that important, then why doesn't Wrangham have a sloping forehead and brow ridges? Wrangham isn't much bothered by that issue because he seems to have a linear, 1960's-style idea of human evolution. Neanderthals came "before" H. sapiens in the Great Chain, right?

This is getting too long for a review, so I'll stop. The main point is that the book makes for a good snack, but it's not substantial enough to make a solid meal today. It may work up an appetite for the subject; but, like our distant ancestors eating raw food, you can chew on this presentation a long time and still not get enough out of it.

The Way To A Man's Brain is Through His Stomach!

This was a fascinating audio book about some of the early behaviors of human beings. The author does a wonderful job and the style in which he writes the book, to help the readers get a visual picture of what life must of been like in the very beginnings of human existence. And he manages to do this without becoming “overly technical or scientific”.

This would be a great book for anyone to read who's interested in the evolution of humans and how the advent of fire/cooking rapidly begin to shape us into the modern human beings we are today.