Wrangham Illuminates Link Between Fire and Evolution

Around 50 members of the Harvard Mind/Brain/Behavior community gathered in the Harvard-Yenching Library yesterday afternoon to hear biological anthropology professor Richard W. Wrangham explain how the cultural invention of cooking food has contributed to human evolution.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, which regards cooking as biologically unimportant, Wrangham said that cooking’s contribution to the evolution of human beings cannot be overlooked.

Wrangham explained that humans have adapted physiologically to eating cooked foods.

Human guts are too small to digest nutritionally poor plant matter and human molars are too small for tough raw foods, Wrangham said.

In order to prove the importance of cooking, Wrangham said he only knows of one person who lived longer than just a few weeks on raw food.

This individual, who was kidnapped in Brazil but managed to escape, survived on bananas for weeks.

Cooked protein is more digestible, explained Wrangham, and people obtain more calories from cooked food than from the same quantity of raw food.

He explained that the extra energy people gain from eating cooked food has allowed for larger brains.

“The effect of meat changing the size of people’s brain was interesting,” said Nathan Cooke, a documentarian for the MIT D-Lab.

Wrangham’s new book “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human," published in May 2009, delves further into the implications of cooking food.

In the book, Wrangham argues that this technological development could even be responsible for the division of labor between men and women.

Wrangham has been a Currier House Master since 2008.

He also teaches a number of courses on biological anthropology at the College, including Freshman Seminar 46o: The Evolutionary Significance of Cooking.

“His research in human evolutionary biology is something that our students have enjoyed hearing about in the past in our junior symposium,” said Shawn C. Harriman, Educational Program Coordinator of the Mind/Brain/Behavior program,  “This is an opportunity for the larger Harvard community to hear about his most recent work and his most recent book.”