Book Discussion: "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" by Richard C. Wrangham

There is ample evidence to assert that cooking may in fact be the thing that separates us from our more primitive ancestors.  In Richard Wrangham's book "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human," the author goes through a number of physiological changes that occurred during an incredibly short period of human evolution... somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 years only. Consider the millions of years as primates, the swift shift that drastically altered our physique in such sweeping changes demands a powerful force of nature be the main inspiration for such changes.
And so, says Wrangham, fire entered the fray.  Some of the more obvious physiological changes to occur to our ancestral Australopithecines as they marched forward through time and evolution toward the Homo habilis and eventually to our own genus name, Homo sapiens sapiens, are what we would define as our primary traits: our relatively fur-free bodies, our upright stature, and our distinct lack of subcutaneous (under the skin) fat, and relatively flat stomachs (rather than the distended bellies of our ancestral creatures). These adaptions give rise to our ability to outrun game, having seemingly endless energy to hunt and to move about, and with the right amount of beer, return ourselves to the shape of our ancestors if we so choose.... at least the distended belly!

Consider the chimp, clearly a further relative of the Homo line of evolution, but in our distant lineage nonetheless. Chimps are able to perform amazing feats of strength, run very quickly in short bursts, and are excellent hunters within their pack range.  But physiologically, the thick layer of fat under their furry skin prevents them from long-term exertion. They overheat quickly, so while their feats of strength can out class any human (especially in the same weight class!), they would be utterly destroyed in any of the longer track and field contests.

The concept is pretty simple, really: apes and great apes need as much or more Calories to power their bodies as modern humans do, from 2000-2500 Calories per day.  In a world of 800 Calorie sandwiches available next door, it is hard to fathom needing to sit in place for up to 8 hours in a single day to chew leaves and various other hard, barely digestible material in order to eek from the environment enough nutrition to get up the next day and do it again. In fact, the massive crown of the Great Apes' head is to anchor the jaw muscles of these beasts, who must chew and chew and chew and chew their food to break it down enough before it reaches their extremely long intestinal system teaming with microorganisms that further help break down the complex fibers to extract the necessary energy.
The short bursts of energy, great strength and constant warmth gives a security to these animals, perfectly adapted to their jungle worlds, where leaves are plenty and predators are few. Simple inter-tribe skirmishes keep competitive tribes at bay, and group hunting provides meat to an otherwise plant and insect based diet.  Something to chew on to say the least.

What Wrangham identified is that humans, lacking these built in protections to keep warm, must have found an external source of warmth and protection, and this he surmises must be fire.  Take into account that it is fire that provides light that shines in approaching predators eyes, makes sudden loud and startling noise, is utterly wild, and provides heat and a sense of centering that is lacking on a moonless or cloudy night when outside of the safety of the tribal tree roost.

That nature would drop the subcutaneous fat layer and the fur is a testament to just how interwoven fire quickly became to our species.  And not without added benefits... as stated above, Homo spp.  have the ability to outrun prey, to run marathons, to keep up intense activity for long periods of time.  Have fire not help us externalize our source of heating, this would never have been possible.

But perhaps more importantly, fire provides a means for externalizing digestion, arguably the main component of almost any other primate, and suddenly renders, through the process of boiling and roasting, new foods such as starchy tubers and roots, edible, as well as starting the breakdown of leaves and bark outside of the body before we ingest it. Thus our bellies and the energy needed to maintain and manage these complex systems of digestion decreased dramatically, perhaps allowing us to stand, walk (and run!) more upright than before. [Note: Externalizing our digestive process is something that we inherently learned from fungus, though it took us many years to return to this practice since Kingdom Animalia and Kingdom Fungi diverged so many billions of years ago].
Indeed, it is the culmination of cooking (and subsequently the ridiculous industrial over-processing of foods) that allows for us to be able to consume in a few short minutes more calories than our ancestors could obtain in a entire day of sitting and chewing, though it is clear now that it is to our own detriment that we have concentrated our efforts at increasing this calories-per-minute measurement.

So perhaps humans should not even be pictured by themselves, but rather with a fire smouldering next to us, like the soul of ourselves that we externalized and now cannot live without. Perhaps this is why every human I have ever met can stare endlessly into a fire without saying a word, I imagine the most meditative most people will ever get: the fire IS us, and as Richard Wrangham concludes, we are better described as the cooking ape, rather than the thinking ape, as the thinking came as a direct result of our previous pact with the element of fire.