The cooking hypothesis
Heat does part of digestion outside the body, and the argument is that this is what made us.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.1 million years
- Known to
- ± 300 thousand years
- Era
- Early Pleistocene, Quaternary
Richard Wrangham's proposal is that cooking, by gelatinising starch and denaturing protein, dramatically increases the energy actually extracted from food and reduces the time and gut needed to process it — which would explain the small teeth, small guts, and large brains that appear with Homo erectus. Feeding experiments support the energetic claim. The difficulty is chronological: the anatomical changes appear around 1.9 million years ago and solid fire evidence does not, which is the central objection to the hypothesis.