How cooking helped us to evolveThe success of the human species is all down to our mastery of fire and cooking , a scientist claims . And hot food not sex was the basis for our relationshipsAnjana Ahuja 12 CommentsRecommend ? ( 15 ) It is the ultimate domestic cliché : a woman , pinafored and dutiful , tending a stove all day in preparation for her husband ’ s homecoming . As soon as he walks in , the ritual can begin : family members take their seats around the table ( he sits at the head , of course ) and dinner is served . Our couple are reliving a scene that has played out billions of times in our history because gender roles — husband at work all day , woman as homebody — have been forged not by relatively recent social conventions but by our distant evolutionary past . For we are the “ cooking ape ” , according to Richard Wrangham , a noted British anthropologist and primatologist at Harvard University . The unrivalled success of the human species is down to our mastery of flame and our use of it to transform raw food into cooked . Ours is a species built on hot dinners , not cold plants and berries . The theory is cold comfort for the raw food movement , which believes that it is natural and healthier to eat uncooked food . “ 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 , ” Wrangham explains in his new book Catching Fire : How Cooking Made Us Human . “ Cooking increased the ( calorific ) value of our food . It changed our bodies , our brains , our use of time and our social lives . ” He argues , as no one else has done before , that cooking was pivotal in our evolution . “ If you feed a chimp cooked food for tens of thousands of years , I find it hard to believe that it would end up looking like the same animal . ” From this , he infers that , for our ancestors , marriages of men and women were ancient pacts built around food , not sex . It was while lying in front of a fire , preparing a lecture , that Wrangham felt his intellect spark . “ I started to wonder how long ago our ancestors had lain at night without fire . It didn ’ t make sense to me that our ancestors could have existed without fire . I ’ d spent time watching chimps and even eating their food , which is mainly fruit and a little meat , all raw . This is difficult stuff to eat . It ’ s like going into the forest and trying to fill up on rosehips — it ’ s not food . You might find something delicious such as a raspberry , but you usually can ’ t find many . ” He began to wonder whether our ancestors could ever have filled their bellies enough on a raw diet to survive , reproduce and evolve into us . Our ancestors , he surmised , must have been cooking — and that meant they needed fire . A mastery of fire would also have allowed them to come down from the trees and sleep on the ground ; fire would not only have provided an ancestral security light , but also a weapon against predators . Cultural , historical and culinary clues point to the plausibility of Wrangham ’ s intuition . There is no society on Earth that does not cook ; not a single people exists on raw food alone . The most remote hunter - gatherer tribes might not have microwaves , but they still pack beans in hot rocks . While the idea of modern humans as carnivores is well - established , our bodies cannot fend off toxins and bacteria found in raw meat , as you would expect if we had evolved to eat it uncooked . It is incredibly hard for us to bite into and digest raw tubers , such as potatoes . And there are no reliable accounts of survivors lasting for more than a couple of months on raw food ; even the survivors of the 1972 Andes plane crash are reported to have cooked their fellow passengers before eating them . Nobody , though , had ever explicitly considered that human beings might owe their spectacular success as a species to their unique propensity to cook . And , to Wrangham ’ s amazement , the scientific debate about how human beings started using fire had never broached the issue of cooking . “ I couldn ’ t believe that nobody had thought about the energetic significance of cooked food [ cooking releases locked - in calories by breaking down molecular structures in plants and meat ; without cooking , some material passes straight through ] . As someone who ’ s been in the bush enough to appreciate a cooked meal , I had a very strong intuition that cooking was crucial to our evolution . I ’ m now convinced that cooking made us human . It was the biggest improvement in diet in the history of life . ” Cooking would have made a radical difference to the creatures who mastered it : it made plants and meat more calorie - dense ; it spared our ancestors from the marathons of mastication required with raw foods ( wild chimps spend up to five hours a day gathering food and chewing it ) ; it was easier on the gut . It is utterly within the bounds of belief that the first hominid to put a flame to his food started an extraordinary chain of evolutionary events that culminated in us , the ape in the kitchen . But Wrangham , who co - wrote Demonic Males , a groundbreaking book on ape violence and its relevance to human violence , strides farther : the advent of cooking led to a restructuring of society and , in particular , liberated men from the chore of chewing but chained women to the stove . Early human marriages , he suggests , were “ primitive protection rackets ” , in which men protected women from hungry marauders ( attracted by the smoke of the fire ) in return for a hot meal at the end of the day and , almost as an afterthought , babies . This is a radical notion — that domestic unions are mainly about food , not sex — but it ’ s not ridiculous . Anthropologists have noted that many primitive societies will tolerate a married woman sleeping around , but will ostracise her if she feeds any man other than her husband . In the ancestral struggle for survival , it seems , sustenance was more important than sex . Human beings are unique in that when we cook , we do it to feed others as well as ourselves ( other apes , even those who pair - bond , forage for themselves and don ’ t share ) . And in almost all societies it ’ s women who tend the stove . Having a husband ensures that a woman ’ s gathered food will not be stolen , while having a wife means a man will have an evening meal . To some , though , this train of thought — that the way to a man ’ s heart really is through his evolutionarily shrunken stomach — is even more heretical than the idea that we are the cooking ape . “ People don ’ t like it because over the past decades we have understood that our social system comes through the competition for reproductive partners . I ’ m saying , pair bonds are firstly about food , and that gave a platform to develop those relationships further . ” Wrangham , who is largely vegetarian ( “ I don ’ t eat mammals but occasionally I ’ ll have a bird , but never a parrot ” ) , was thrilled when he came across the work of the anthropologists Jane Collier and Michelle Rosaldo that exposed the marital dynamics around food in different , small - scale societies . “ It ’ s clear that many societies are more tolerant of sexual messing about than they are of a domestic arrangement being upset ( such as an intrusion during a family mealtime ) . ” It is true that we are remarkably fussy about the way we eat : there is a strict table etiquette , a pattern to the handouts ( husbands often receive the best meat ) and it is regarded as a social sin to interrupt a mealtime , even if it ’ s sandwiches at a desk . “ It ’ s hard for us to understand the importance of food because , for us , food is easy , ” Wrangham says . “ We can buy it and we can get preprepared meals . This is not the case for the majority of the world . In some societies , it really matters to a husband that he can come back to a meal cooked by his wife . Not that Wrangham ’ s wife cooks : “ We ’ re housemasters for a Harvard college , so we hardly ever cook . We eat with the students most nights . I ’ ve often looked at them and wondered whether I should be studying them , as well as the chimpanzees . We ’ ve come to see food as a way to explore pleasure , as cuisine , to be enjoyed . That ’ s not how our ancestors saw it . For them , food was a way to survive and have babies . ” His theory that we are the cooking ape , knocks the stuffing out of the raw food movement , which claims uncooked or lightly prepared food to be more natural . But neither history , nor science testifies to the naturalness , for humans , of a raw food diet . Survivors of disasters who get by on raw food invariably show signs of starvation when rescued . The Giessen Raw Food study , conducted by German nutritionists in 2005 , studied more than 500 people who ate a diet that was 70 to 100 per cent raw ( vegetables , fruits , cold - pressed oil and honey , plus dried fruits , meat and fish ) . All the raw - foodists lost weight , sometimes dramatically ; the scientists concluded that “ a raw diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply ” . And this in the well - fed West , where the supermarket rather than the forest floor is our larder . Our ancestors would surely have suffered more parlously . But most damning of all was the finding that many women on the study stopped menstruating . Others saw their cycles become irregular . Conception and pregnancy — that most natural of biological processes — would be a rare feat on an uncooked diet . Wrangham ’ s message is clear : “ I ’ m impressed by its potential to be a healthy diet but we must be aware of its limitations . I ’ m amazed at the willpower of some raw foodists but some are deluded ; they are wrong about it being natural . If you are cast away on a desert island and you say , ‘ I won ’ t bother cooking ’, you will die . ” Our evolutionary history — with one line of descent leading to chimps , and another to us — shows a dramatic change about 1 . 9 million years ago . If we travelled that far back in time , we would come face to face — or brow to brow — with Homo habilis , or the habilines , our distinctly apelike ancestors that are the closest thing we have to a missing link . These diminutive , chimpanzee - like creatures , who walked upright but were agile climbers , changed abruptly over the course of 100 , 000 years . And it is this step - jump in evolution — which led to our forerunner , Homo erectus — that Wrangham credits to cooking . Homo erectus had , as we do , small teeth and weak jaws that would have been ill - suited to ripping raw meat . The smaller gut and slimmer ribcage of erectus also fits with his theory , since cooked food requires less digestive effort . The leftover energy allowed our ancestors ’ brains to expand . The result was clever social creatures with large brains ( to handle friendships , rivalries and double - dealing that happen in large groups ) who cooked ; ie , us . While chimps pulverise meat to make it tender , we are the only species that cooks with fire . There is one snag : anthropologists think that our ability to control fire dates back merely hundreds of thousands of years , not the near two million years that Wrangham ’ s theory would suggest . Not that this bothers him : “ Let ’ s be clear : there ’ s no doubt that we are biologically adapted to eat cooked food . Then there ’ s the separate question of when it happened , about which there is , I admit , a lingering uncertainty . We have circumstantial evidence for 1 . 9 million years ago : the reduced gut size , smaller teeth , the fact that habilis was a climber and erectus was not . “ But you can light a fire in the bush , and come back months later and find no trace of it . I ’ m hoping we ’ ll find genes we can date to a certain period , that are involved in the digestion of cooked food . I ’ d be amazed if I turned out to be wrong . ” Catching Fire : How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham is published by Profile on September 24 at £ 15 . To order it for £ 13 . 50 , inc p & p , call 0845 2712134 or visit : www . timesonline . co . uk / booksfirst