Survival
By Meghan Khalsa
Have you ever eaten a raw potato? Would you want to? Chances are, your answer is no. Like most of us, you probably prefer your potatoes mashed, baked, boiled, or fried. It is not just a preference for taste or texture (although these are factors) but also an evolutionary adaptation.
Early humans survived on raw foods. They foraged and hunted whatever was available, consuming food in its natural state. While raw food provides energy, it can be challenging to consume and digest efficiently. That changed when our ancestors learned to control fire.
Cooking transformed the way humans processed food by making it easier to chew and digest, giving more energy in less time, and enhancing flavor. These critical benefits led early humans to prefer cooked foods over raw foods. Over time, humans evolved anatomical adaptations including smaller teeth, weaker jaws, and shorter colons than our ape counterparts, meaning that softer cooked food is easier for us to chew and digest.
In a Leakey Foundation Survival Symposium lecture entitled โSurvival: The Human Diet,โ biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham examines how cooking impacted human evolution. Wrangham is a leading expert in primate behavior and human evolution, the Ruth B. Moore Research Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University, and co-director of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in Uganda. His groundbreaking research, explored in his New York Times best-selling book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, suggests that the ability to harness fire and cook food was a pivotal factor in our speciesโ success.
Learn more about diet, cooking, and human evolution
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Book: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham
A New York Times bestseller! Learn how cooking shaped human evolution.
Get the book
Podcast: Did Cooking Make Us Human?
Listen to Richard Wrangham and Rachel Carmody talk about the evolution of cooking
Listen now
Research Paper: โControl of Fire in the Paleolithicโ
Read Richard Wranghamโs reevaluation of the Cooking Hypothesis
Read or download PDF
Additional Reading: The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman
Learn about the evolution of the human body and diet.
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Video: Survival symposium playlist
Watch leading scientists including Dan Lieberman, Steven Pinker, and Pardis Sabeti discuss evolutionary insights on humanityโs greatest challenges.
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Survival is a Leakey Foundation program focused on using evolutionary science to understand and address the biggest challenges facing humanity today. This program is made possible by the generous support of the Wirthlin family.
