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Box 5.2 Was Cooking the Driving Force of Human Evolution? Anthropologists are often interested in the driving force of human evolution. One popular hypothesis is that the driving force was cooking. The hypothesis is valid, but is not widely accepted. It makes sense to many, but skepticism remains because of the lack of evidence in the archaeological record, including the lack of evidence for the control of fire close to two million years ago. The person most often associated with the hypothesis that cooking was the driving force of human evolution is Richard Wrangham, who outlined his hypothesis in the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, published in 2009. He summarizes his idea as follows: I believe the transformative moment that gave rise to the genus Homo, one of the great transformations in the history of life, stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals. Cooking increased the value of our food. It changed our bodies, our brains, our use of time, and our social lives. It made us consumers of external energy and thereby created an organism with a new relationship to nature, dependent on fuel. (p. 2) Wrangham suggests that the initial change that made us human was increased meat eating about 2.5 million years ago (associated with Homo habilis), followed by cooking about 1.8 million years ago (associated with Homo erectus). He describes the value of cooking: Cooked food does many familiar things. It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes, and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut, or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from our food. The extra energy gave the first cooks biological advantages. They survived and reproduced better than before. Their genes spread. Their bodies responded by biologically adapting to cooked food, shaped by natural selection to take maximum advantage of the new diet. There were changes in anatomy, physiology, ecology, life history, psychology, and society. Fossil evidence indicates that this dependence arose not just some tens of thousands of years ago, or even a few hundred thousand, but right back at the beginning of our time on Earth, at the start of human evolution, by the habiline that become Homo erectus. (pp. 13–14) In humans, because we have adapted to cooked food, its spontaneous advantages are complemented by evolutionary benefits. The evolutionary benefits stem from the fact that digestion is a costly process that can account for a high proportion of an individual’s energy budget—often as much as locomotion does. After our ancestors started eating cooked food every day, natural selection favored those with small guts, because they were able to digest their food well, but at a lower cost than before. The result was increased energetic efficiency. (p. 40) © 2016 University of Toronto Press While it is widely accepted that early Homo incorporated some meat in their diet, the significance of meat and the adoption of hunting strategies clearly increased with the emergence of Homo erectus. The driving force may be linked with the use of fire for cooking, although this idea is controversial. (See Box 5.2.) There is considerable evidence that hunting, at least for the past few hundred thousand years, included big game such as mammoths and mastodons. This would Chapter 5: Human Cultural Evolution from 2.5 Million to 20,000 Years Ago UTP LensAnthro Interior-F.indd 99 99 2015-09-23 12:11 PM