4 Field Colloquium: How Cooking Made Us Human

Unlike the other great apes, humans are dependent upon fire for survival. A critical adaptive benefit is that cooking leads to large increases in net energy gain. Cooking probably originated with the genus Homo, but regardless of the time of origin, it had enormous consequences. Richard Wrangham will consider the impacts of cooking  and the control of fire on life history and brain evolution and diet, including access to meat and honey - critical resources for modern hunter-gatherers.