Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

The Leakey Foundation
The Leakey Foundation
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Published 2013-02-13
Speaker Series lecture by Dr. Richard Wrangham, Professor at Harvard University and co-director of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project

Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man, the existence of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. Renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham presents a startling alternative: our evolutionary success is the result of cooking. In a groundbreaking theory of our origins, Dr. Wrangham will show that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key factor in human evolution.

When our ancestors adapted to using fire, humanity began.

Once our hominid ancestors began cooking their food, the human digestive tract shrank and the brain grew. Time once spent chewing tough raw food could be used instead to hunt and to tend camp. Cooking became the basis for pair bonding and marriage, created the household, and even led to a sexual division of labor.

Tracing the contemporary implications of our ancestors' diets, Dr. Wrangham sheds new light on how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. A pathbreaking new theory of human evolution, Dr. Wrangham will fascinate anyone interested in our ancient origins or in our modern eating habits.

Dr. Richard Wrangham is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. He is co-director of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project, the long-term study of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda. His research culminates in the study of human evolution in which he draws conclusions based on the behavioral ecology of apes. As a graduate student, Dr. Wrangham studied under Robert Hinde and Jane Goodall. He also helped the late Dian Fossey establish her eponymous Gorilla Fund to protect and research the Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012 @ 6:30pm

Houston Museum of Natural Science
All Comments (21)
  • @hippocrates72
    27:20 Raw foodism 28:13 104°Fahrenheit ! (40°C) 28:17 domesticated 28:50 no seasonal variation (global imports) 29:10 less energy expenditure 29:16 overweight domestic pets: loss in weight control like humans, urban rats, hedgehogs: bread & milk 31:30 starch: cooked starch makes large plasma peaks (DM!) 36:00 raw/cooked eggs 44:35 urban raw fooders (fertility under hypomenorrhea) 55:00 AGE flavors (cooked foods) are preferred 56:00 soft food (soft pulp fruit, i.e. safou) 59:00 human females lost their independence to food preparation (cooking)
  • @KenDBerryMD
    Fascinating lecture, watching it for the second time now...
  • @jfkluge
    Heaven! I could watch programs like this all day. I'd read the book, but the added insight and additional ideas presented in the Q&A period was terrific.
  • @tylermoore4429
    This lecture blew my mind - in a good way. Dr. Richard's lucid explanations and responses, laced with humor, really put to rest a lot of doubts that I had been struggling with for years, for example the long gap between the time we start to see big anatomical changes in hominids around 2 million years ago and the purported discovery of fire around 500 thousand years ago.
  • @bruswan
    Very informative and enjoyable. Then again I could spent hours watching programs like this. Some of us just love love evolution and our human origin history.
  • @donaldcampbell3043
    Back in 2003 I was studying Anthropology at Otago University we had a guest speaker Professor Sydney Mince from John Hopkins University present several lectures on diet and cuisine and the effects of diet on human brain growth and evolution... so this lecture caught my eye...
  • @IamBananaJack
    This is a very interesting topic. Cooking may be the first example of a species altering its own evolution by way of an adapted technology. I loved this and found the speaker to be very informative thank you for the upload. I personally would have done a few things differently as far as editing though, like getting the video from the beginning and splicing it into the clip and perhaps boost the audio a bit. but all in all a very good video with acceptable editing. 
  • @XX-qi5eu
    Fire gave us consciousness--the ability to plan ahead and think abstractly. Fire kept predators away so early man was free from the constant now of survival and was freed to think and plan, while other animals had to always be ready to fight or run. No animal can plan for the future much past 30 minutes. The use of fire was much more a factor in our becoming human than just cooking.
  • @joeschmo5699
    this guy is a smart dude and a solid scientist. I'm going with we started cooking, as Homo erectus, about 1.9 mya. Lack of evidence of fire is less compelling than the tooth and guts evidence.
  • @johnrobinson4445
    Brilliant book. Makes it astonishing that nobody ever tested the raw food issue before. Proteins become denatured by heat. More energy and nutrients are available. Suddenly, automatically, any part of the body (including the brain) that is stressed (and living in the wild is stressful!) now has more energy and resources to respond to that stress. Like a body-builder's muscles, the brain simply GROWS. And the stomach shrinks because the food is easier to digest. Bingo: humanity.