This week on the World Science Podcast, and in the World Science Forum

Tweet

Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that cooking is the key technology that allowed us to become human. He’s spent decades doing research on primates in Africa, and he says cooking gave us access to a wider range of foods, helped our brains grow, and – because we no longer had to eat berries and leaves for six hours a day — gave us leisure time to develop tools and technologies.

He’s got some really unexpected ideas: He’s also got a lot to say about how the explosion of soft food plays a key role in the obesity epidemic; how cooking led to the subjugation of women – and about his own experience eating raw meat and leaves like chimpanzees do. Read more