Ron Peters's Reviews > Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Cooking food makes it easier to digest, saving energy, yielding a metabolic surplus that can be put toward the energetically expensive proposition of having a big brain, allowing us to become human. (Human brains use up 20% of the energy we expend.)

More specifically: a) humans who try it today subsist poorly on raw food diets (e.g., they lose their ability to reproduce), b) no past or present cultures have subsisted entirely on raw foods, and c) humans show a range of characteristics (compared with earlier ancestors and with contemporary primates) that strongly suggest we are adapted to cooked foods.

The adaptations include small mouths, small molars, weak jaws, small stomachs with fast transit times, and shorter large intestines. Hairlessness is argued to be a more general adaptation to the availability of nighttime fires. Meanwhile, as we moved from Australopithecus to H. Erectus our tooth sizes decreased 21%, our bodies got bigger, we lost our climbing adaptations, our ribs flared less (owing to smaller guts), and our cranial capacity increased 42%.

He puts up a good case for these scenarios. As with many books that set out novel hypotheses, much of the book is spent fending off alternative hypotheses. He extends some of his thinking into other areas – arguing that cooking led to pair bonding, households, and the permanent separation of gender roles – that should have been prefaced with a clear proviso that most of us are no longer hunter-gatherers. (Also, see this piece on early women hunters: https://is.gd/AxyPwE.)But his core concept is good, and the text is clear and non-technical enough that it is fast and easy to read.