15 Quotes by Richard W. Wrangham

Food historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto proposed that cooking created mealtimes and thereby organized people into a community. For culinary historian Michael Symons, cooking promoted cooperation through sharing, because the cook always distributes food. Cooking, he wrote, is “the starting-place of trades.

Brillat-Savarin and Symons were right to say that we have tamed nature with fire. We should indeed pin our humanity on cooks.

The weight of our guts is estimated at about 60 percent of what is expected for a primate of our size: the human digestive system as a whole is much smaller than would be predicted on the basis of size relations in primates. Our small mouths, teeth, and guts fit well with the softness, high caloric density, low fiber content, and high digestibility of cooked food.

Are we just an ordinary animal that happens to enjoy the tastes and securities of cooked food without in any way depending on them? Or are we a new kind of species tied to the use of fire by our biological needs, relying on cooked food to supply enough energy to our bodies?

Another version of the same formula applied to many Tiwi marriages. In this highly polygynous culture, old men took most of the young wives, so more than 90 percent of men’s first marriages were to widows much older than themselves, sometimes as old as sixty. The old wives might have been past child-bearing age and physically unattractive, but young men delighted in the marriages because they were then fed.

So the question of our origins concerns the forces that sprung Homo erectus from their australopithecine past. Anthropologists have an answer. According to the most popular view since the 1950s there was a single supposed impetus: the eating of meat.

I believe the transformative moment that gave rise to the genus Homo, one of the great transitions in the history of life, stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals.

An animal slaughtered without being stressed retains more glycogen in its muscles. After death the glycogen converts to lactic acid, which promotes denaturation and therefore a more tender meat.

We are not merely the most intelligent of animals. We also have a rare and perplexing combination of moral tendencies. We can be the nastiest of species and also the nicest.