Quotes from Richard W. Wrangham

Animals need food, water and shelter. We humans need all those things, but we need fire too.

The sexual division of labor refers to women and men making different and complementary contributions to the household economy. Though the specific activities of each sex vary by culture, the gendered division of labor is a human universal. It is therefore assumed to have appeared well before modern humans started spreading across the globe sixty thousand to seventy thousand years ago.

Under this system, an unmarried woman who offers food to a man is effectively flirting, if not offering betrothal. Male anthropologists have to be aware of this to avoid embarrassment in such societies. Cofeeding is often the only marriage ceremony, such that if an unmarried pair are seen eating together, they are henceforward regarded as married.

Among women eating totally raw diets, about 50 percent entirely ceased to menstruate. A further proportion, about 10 percent, suffered irregular menstrual cycles that left them unlikely to conceive. These figures are far higher than for women eating cooked food. Healthy women on cooked diets rarely fail to menstruate, whether or not they are vegetarian. But ovarian function predictably declines in women suffering from extreme energy depletion, such as marathoners and anorexics.

In societies with no restaurants or supermarkets, the need for a wife can lead a man to desperate measures. Among the Inuit, where a woman contributed no food calories, her cooking and production of warm, dry hunting clothes were vital: a man cannot both hunt and cook. The pressure could drive widowers or bachelors to neighboring territories in an attempt to steal a woman, even if it meant killing her husband.

the idea that food enzymes contribute to digestion or cellular function in our bodies is nonsense because these molecules are themselves digested in our stomachs and small intestines.

Hunter-gatherer women are therefore not normally treated badly, and many ethnographers have concluded that, in comparison to most societies, married women lead lives of high status and considerable autonomy.

Gathering can be just as critical as hunting because men sometimes return with nothing, in which case the family must rely entirely on gathered foods.

Phyllis Kaberry's description of an aborigine camp in western Australia is typical: "The Aborigines continually craved for meat, and any man was apt to declare, 'me hungry alonga bingy,' though he had had a good meal of yams and damper a few minutes before. The camp on such occasions became glum, lethargic, and unenthusiastic about dancing.

The proposal that the human household originated in competition over food presents a challenge to conventional thinking because it holds economics as primary and sexual relations as secondary.

wild fruits are not nearly as rewarding as those domesticated fruits. The edible pulp of a forest fruit is often physically hard, and it may be protected by a skin, coat, or hairs that have to be removed. Most fruits have to be chewed for a long time before the pulp can be fully detached from the pieces of skin or seeds, and before the solid pieces are mashed enough to give up their valuable nutrients.

Hadza men were close to the average, spending more than 4 hours a day hunting—about eighty times as long as an Ngogo chimpanzee.

Males have evolved to possess strong appetites for power because with extraordinary power males can achieve extraordinary reproduction.

Women's evolved strategic responses to male demonism have included countermeasures and defiance, but they also included collaboration. That is to say, while men have evolved to be demonic males, it seems likely that women have evolved to prefer demonic males (or imitation demonic males) as mates.

those who have political power can count on someone coming to their aid - the police or the military or the mob or the family, or the royal guard.

We should accept the likelihood that male violence and male dominance over women have long been a part of our history. But with an evolutionary perspective we can firmly reject the pessimists who say it has to stay that way. Male demonism is not inevitable.

That great human brain is nature's most frightening product. But it is simultaneously nature's best, most hopeful gift. If we are cursed with a demonic male temperament and a Machiavellian capacity to express it, we are also blessed with an intelligence that can, through the acquisition of wisdom, draw us away from the 5-million-year stain of our ape past. Intelligence is something we are familiar with, an old book, and old friend.

fish from the cache became "high"—in other words, smelly because they were partially rotten. Most people liked the strong taste. Jenness saw "a man take a bone from rotten caribou-meat cached more than a year before, crack it open and eat the marrow with evident relish although it swarmed with maggots.

resistant starch" is vivid testimony to the deficits of a raw starch diet, explaining why we like our starch cooked and contributing to the weight loss that raw-foodists experience.