The Cooking Hypothesis Revisited : Fresh Food for Thought

Richard Wrangham and colleagues first introduced the cooking hypothesis in a 1999 article entitled " The Raw and the Stolen: Cooking and the Ecology of Human Origins " (Wrangham, Jones, Laden, Pilbeam, and Conklin-Brittain, 1999). This hypothesis posits that because cooking greatly increases the quality of food, its origin and subsequent boost in energetics must have resulted in major transformations in the human lineage, both morphologically and behaviorally. Wrangham argues that the greatest transition in the fossil record, and hence the origin of cooking, occurs with Homo erectus at 1.8 million years ago. Skeptics argued against this hypothesis in its original form largely on two grounds. First, there is little archaeological evidence for controlled use of fire that early. Second, many saw the cooking hypothesis as the antithesis to the Man-the-Hunter hypothesis, namely that the changes from ape-like australopithecines to human-like Homo erectus were the result of meat-eating, not cooking. In his latest book, Catching Fire, Wrangham provides a wealth of new evidence in support of his theory, drawing from the paleontological and archaeological records, modern primate studies, ethnographies, and experiments in digestive physiology. While some called his original article a " just-so " story, this new book is so broad in its scholarship that it marks one of the most masterfully constructed hypotheses in human behavioral evolution today. Catching Fire essentially serves up a three-course meal. First, Wrangham presents a wealth of evidence that cooking yields major nutritional benefits. Second, he reviews the archaeological and fossil records, examining several major transitions in the hominid lineage as potentials for the origin of cooking, and he argues that cooking originated with the appearance of Homo erectus. Finally, he explores the behavioral ramifications of the origin of cooking, including the evolution of the sexual division of labor and pair bonds. Wrangham effectively establishes the significance of cooking by examining the consequences of a raw food diet in humans as well as experimental manipulations of diet in captive animals. His argument begins by examining people who choose to eat only raw food. Studies reveal that raw foodists are under energy deficits that cause half of raw foodist women to suffer amenorrhea. Such a rate of infertility would be devastating in hunter-gatherer populations