The Cooking Ape

Wrangham makes several casual links to the relationship between mastering fire and using it to cook and what made humans who we are. He first talks about the physical changes mastering fire and learning to cook had on the human body. Cooking food makes it more digestible and therefore we are able to take in more calories. The more calories we take in, the more energy humans have. The greater amount of energy that came from cooking food resulted in humans having bigger bodies and the development of a large proportion of organs. Cooking food also softens food, which enables humans to have smaller teeth and smaller jaws, as well as smaller guts. Mastering fire translates into cooking by looking at the cognitive development of humans. Once our ancestors were able to control fire they were able to experiment and play with it, which would have led them to try mixing fire and food.

            Wrangham also makes links to how cooking affected the social structure of humans. Cooking forces a species to keep food for a period of time, creating ownership. Whenever there is ownership of something, competition is created. The ownership of food through cooking created the competition for food we have today. Cooking food also allows humans to have big families in which the children are dependent. Unlike apes that wean their infants at about 3 to 5 years old, humans have children that are dependent till at least 12 years old. This dependence on cooked food is what strengthens the parent/child role. Feeding infants cooked mush allows them to abandon nursing early and gives the mother more energy. This increase in energy is what led mothers to be able to reproduce in quicker intervals and created bigger families. Finally, Wrangham mentions that due to the great amount of energy we acquire from cooking food humans have better immune systems and therefore have a lower mortality rate.