Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

In Catching Fire, one of the most ambitious arguments about human evolution since Darwin’s Descent of Man, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham makes the claim that learning to cook food was the hinge on which human evolution turned. Eating cooked food, he argues, enabled us to evolve our large brains, and cooking itself became a primary focus of human social activity—in short, cooking made us the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. Path-breaking and provoca…