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Hacker News Comments on
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

Richard Wrangham · 2 HN comments
HN Books has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" by Richard Wrangham.
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Amazon Summary
Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man, the existence of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. But in Catching Fire, renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham presents a startling alternative: our evolutionary success is the result of cooking. In a groundbreaking theory of our origins, Wrangham shows that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key factor in human evolution. When our ancestors adapted to using fire, humanity began. Once our hominid ancestors began cooking their food, the human digestive tract shrank and the brain grew. Time once spent chewing tough raw food could be sued instead to hunt and to tend camp. Cooking became the basis for pair bonding and marriage, created the household, and even led to a sexual division of labor. Tracing the contemporary implications of our ancestors’ diets, Catching Fire sheds new light on how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. A pathbreaking new theory of human evolution, Catching Fire will provoke controversy and fascinate anyone interested in our ancient origins—or in our modern eating habits.
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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.
Yeah, this books makes the case against raw diets very well:

https://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/0...

That's the thing with diets. There is a real well reasoned argument for and against most anything...

shanev
You're the 4th or 5th person to recommend this book to me. Guess I have to read it now :)
BurningFrog
Actually, I'm one of your previous in person recommenders (didn't notice the user name), so only 3rd or 4th :)

Still a really fascinating and well written book.

fpoling
Does the book really present evidence that a raw diet is worse for human health than cooked food? From the table of content and introduction it seems to present a strong case that cooking affected human evolution. But that does not mean that it made humans healthier. For example, cooking could have made long-term health worse, but other benefits coming from increased food availability and shortening time to get it outweighed that.
BurningFrog
It's not the main point of the book, but it does describe how it's very hard to live a healthy life on only raw food. I remember it pointing out that about half of women on such diets stop menstruating.

This is something our bodies do out of pretty desperate lack of nutrients, and it's of course devastating from an evolutionary standpoint.

The thesis of the book is that we've cooked food for so long that our digestive system is adapted to it. It even speculates that the shrunken digestive system made our bigger brains possible. All that is far from uncontroversial, but it's a well written and argued text.

This means fire was used before homo sapiens existed, fascinating. We might have evolved to eat cooked/roasted food.

I thought a lot of the links to Richard Wrangham's research on the origins of cooking had already been widely shared on Hacker News. Here is a chronological list of a few stories on his research to show how this line of research has developed over the last decade.

http://img2.tapuz.co.il/forums/1_140989346.pdf

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/06.13/01-cooking.ht...

http://evolutionaryanthropology.duke.edu/uploads/assets/Wobb...

http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-Cooking-Made-Human/dp/04...

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/articles/RW%20RC%20Ev%20...

I was very surprised when I saw the early dates (before the emergence of Homo sapiens as a species) for the earliest evidence of cooking. The current view is cooking actually enabled hominin evolution in the direction of smaller gut sizes and larger brain sizes, as is characteristic of Homo sapiens.

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