Rachael A. Carmen

The Creatures of Flame: Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire

Where do we come from? At this point in human history, the best evidence suggests that evolution by natural selection has been the dominant force in shaping human’s cognitive processes and physical structures (Buss 2004). In making the case that processes connected to cooking hold the true key to human origins, Richard Wrangham (2009) begins his fascinating account deep in time in the jungles of Africa. From Wrangham’s perspective, evolution has touched all aspects of what it means to be human. In particular, Wrangham evaluates a daily process, cooking, in terms of its evolutionary service. From bipedalism to our large brains, cooking has affected the very essence of what separates humans from other species. Wrangham’s major hypothesis is coined “the cooking hypothesis,” and is centered around our adapted diet of cooked food, and how the results of cooking pervade our lives—from our bodies to our minds (p. 14). Wrangham argues that the advent of fire, and cooking (as a result), gave rise to the genus Homo (p. 2).