Catching Fire Chapter Summary

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In the book Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human, the author, Richard Wrangham argued that cooking not only allowed our ancestors to transfer more energy to form bigger brains and evolve from apes to human, but also made the sexual division of labor possible; that being so, created the hunter-gatherer society.

Comparing to other apes, human have shorter intestines. Our stomach and mouth are smaller, and our teeth are less substantial. This is because digestion require a lot of time and energy. While other apes spend more than half of their waking time chewing and digesting, the use of cooking helps us soften the food and transform them in a form that the human body can digest more efficiently. We spend no more than an hour a day chewing. According to Wrangham, “The anthropologists concluded that spend less energy fueling their intestines can afford to power more brain tissue” (Wrangham, Chapter 5). By eating cooked food, human reduce the energy going to the gut and free up the energy that we formerly spent on digestion, thus we are able to have a bigger brain.

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He speculated that the hunter-gatherer society is based on the gender roles. Cooking was the women’s job. Since males are physically stronger, the females had to rely on the protection the males provide in order to protect her food from marauder. “Having a husband ensures that a woman's gathered foods will not be taken by others; having a wife ensures the man will have an evening meal.” (Wrangham, Chapter 7). I agreed that cooking plays in some role of the way human distributed tasks between males and females. However, I found it unconvincing that cooking was only done by women. Considering, fifty percent of their diet coming from planting and gathering. In a hunter-gatherer society, men would have as much time to cook as women. Women were likely to be involved in group hunting as
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