Quotes from Richard W. Wrangham

I believe the transformative moment that gave rise to the genus Homo, one of the great transitions in the history of life, stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals.

Hundreds of different hunter-gatherer cultures have been described, and all obtained a substantial proportion of their diet from meat, often half their calories or more.

Women in these societies often dislike marriage specifically because as wives they are obliged to produce food for men, and they have to work harder than they would as unmarried women.

The weight of our guts is estimated at about 60 percent of what is expected for a primate of our size: the human digestive system as a whole is much smaller than would be predicted on the basis of size relations in primates. Our small mouths, teeth, and guts fit well with the softness, high caloric density, low fiber content, and high digestibility of cooked food.

compared to that of great apes, the reduction in human gut size saves humans at least 10 percent of daily energy expenditure: the more gut tissue in the body, the more energy must be spent on its metabolism.

In addition to having a small gape, our mouths have a relatively small volume—about the same size as chimpanzee mouths, even though we weigh some 50 percent more than they do. Zoologists often try to capture the essence of our species with such phrases as the naked, bipedal, or big-brained ape. They could equally well call us the small-mouthed ape.

So the question of our origins concerns the forces that sprung Homo erectus from their australopithecine past. Anthropologists have an answer. According to the most popular view since the 1950s there was a single supposed impetus: the eating of meat.

We get into fights or lust for imperial dominion over another nation for reasons of pride.

Food historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto proposed that cooking created mealtimes and thereby organized people into a community. For culinary historian Michael Symons, cooking promoted cooperation through sharing, because the cook always distributes food. Cooking, he wrote, is "the starting-place of trades.

Brillat-Savarin and Symons were right to say that we have tamed nature with fire. We should indeed pin our humanity on cooks.

Are we just an ordinary animal that happens to enjoy the tastes and securities of cooked food without in any way depending on them? Or are we a new kind of species tied to the use of fire by our biological needs, relying on cooked food to supply enough energy to our bodies?

Men need their personal cooks because the guarantee of an evening meal frees them to spend the day doing what they want, and allows them to entertain other men. They can find opportunities for sexual interactions more easily than they can find a food provider.

Another version of the same formula applied to many Tiwi marriages. In this highly polygynous culture, old men took most of the young wives, so more than 90 percent of men's first marriages were to widows much older than themselves, sometimes as old as sixty. The old wives might have been past child-bearing age and physically unattractive, but young men delighted in the marriages because they were then fed.

We are not merely the most intelligent of animals. We also have a rare and perplexing combination of moral tendencies. We can be the nastiest of species and also the nicest.

there is one thing we all take from granted: from hunter-gatherers to the Pope, we all live by a moral compass.

Before we can talk or walk, we are programmed to recognize norm violators - those whose antisocial behavior classifies them as "bad".

History is far more important than evolutionary theorizing as a reminder about human potential, because the historical evidence of change is so much more vivid.

In 1995 Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler proposed that the reason some animals have evolved big brains is that they have small guts, and small guts are made possible by a high-quality diet. Aiello and Wheeler's head-spinning idea came from the realization that brains are exceptionally greedy for glucose—in other words, for energy. For an inactive person, every fifth meal is eaten solely to power the brain.

the implication is clear: there is something odd about us. We are not like other animals. In most circumstances, we need cooked food.

However, among people who eat cooked diets, there is no difference in body weight between vegetarians and meat eaters: when our food is cooked we get as many calories from a vegetarian diet as from a typical American meat-rich diet. It is only when eating raw that we suffer poor weight gain.

A wife who cooks badly might be beaten, shouted at, chased, or have her possessions broken, but she can respond to abuse by refusing to cook or threatening to leave. Such disputes seem to be characteristic mostly of new marriages.

When we eat, our metabolic rate rises, the maximum increase averaging 25 percent. The corresponding figures for fish (136 percent) and for snakes (687 percent) are vastly higher, showing that humans pay less for digestion than other species, presumably due partly to our food being cooked. But the cost of digestion is still significant for humans and can be reduced or raised depending on the food type.

The moral contradictions of our ancestry should not prevent us from reaching a realistic assessment of who we are. Whehn we do that, high hopes are still possible.

Without the learned skills passed down to us by previous generations, we are in trouble. With them, we dominate the planet.