Can I read Catching Fire : How Cooking Made Us Human on EtoBox?

Catching Fire : How Cooking Made Us Human by Wrangham, Richard is a science book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Catching Fire : How Cooking Made Us Human about?

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Contrary to the dogmas of raw-foods enthusiasts, cooked cuisine was central to the biological and social evolution of humanity, argues this fascinating study. Harvard biological anthropologist Wrangham (_Demonic Males_) dates the breakthrough in human evolution to a moment 1.8 million years ago, when, he conjectures, our forebears tamed fire and began cooking. Starting with Homo erectus —who should perhaps be renamed Homo gastronomicus —these innovations drove anatomical and physiological changes that make us adapted to eating cooked food the way cows are adapted to eating grass. By making food more digestible and easier to extract energy from, Wrangham reasons, cooking enabled hominids' jaws, teeth and guts to shrink, freeing up calories to fuel their expanding brains. It also gave rise to pair bonding and table manners, and liberated mankind from the drudgery of chewing (while chaining womankind to the stove). Wrangham's lucid, accessible treatise ranges across nutritional science, paleontology and studies of ape behavior and hunter-gatherer societies; the result is a tour de force of natural history and a profound analysis of cooking's r

Who reads Catching Fire : How Cooking Made Us Human?

Author

Wrangham, Richard

Publisher

Basic Civitas Books

Published

2010

Language

EN

ISBN

9780465013623

Category

science

Subjects

Anthropology, Medical, Social Science

Rating

3.83 / 5 (38 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14