Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human
By Richard Wrangham
Profile £15, 309 pages
FT Bookshop price: £12

This lucidly written and accessible popular science book argues that cooking was crucial in the evolution of the human race. Its thesis is not just that some experimentally minded members of homo erectus got the idea of cooking food, but that the epochal evolution of the homines from habilines (big-brained apes) can only be explained by the move from eating raw to cooked food. Cooking, according to Richard Wrangham, accounts for our small guts, our big brains, and the sexual division of labour prevalent in nearly all societies; in effect, the beginnings of human economy as well as our particular pair-bonding and culture itself.

That may sound like the wishful thinking of a gourmet or a French cultural theorist, but Wrangham is a level-headed Englishman who is Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard. What makes his thesis so gripping to read is that it is elegantly argued, step by step, using evidence from palaeontology, primatology, the anthropological study of hunter-gatherer societies and the science of food digestion.

The first step is to establish that raw food, including raw meat, often touted as the crucial factor in turning apes into men, is unsatisfactory as a human diet. This may well have been already obvious to most people other than raw food fanatics, especially salad-hating males, but Wrangham cites the Giessen Raw Food study conducted on 513 volunteers in which half of the women fed on raw food stopped menstruating. Counter-intuitively, he says, cooked food produces far more energy and nutrition than raw food because it is easier to chew and digest. This permits the development of the big human brain, almost four times the size of a chimpanzee’s.

But cooking brings difficulties too. The basic problem is simple: who will do the cooking – guarding the vulnerable food that (before the days of ready-meals) requires hours of preparation? No prizes for guessing that the answer in more than 97.8 per cent of the 185 cultures studied by the anthropologists Murdock and Provost is women.

Having a woman to keep the home fires burning enables the male hunter, in hunter-gatherer societies, to spend all day hunting in the knowledge that a sustaining meal awaits him. In these societies, cooking seems to be a stronger bond than sex.

Wrangham agrees with those, from John Stuart Mill to contemporary feminists, who regard this as a raw deal for women. So though cooking may make us human, the sexual division of labour it has produced also “trapped women into a subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture”.

He ends, leaping rather abruptly from the neolithic to the digital age, with a chapter on the health problems caused in affluent societies by eating too rich a diet. What he doesn’t examine is the question of whether, if cooking has made us human, giving up cooking in favour of eating pre-prepared food might be making us less human once more.