HIS 12 - Catching Fire Essay PDF

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Essay Title: Guts, Brains, and Gender...

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Andrea Silvera HIS 012 A02 October 19, 2018 Guts, Brains, and Gender

The concept of humans utilizing fire for cooking travels back to prehistoric times. Cooking began more than 300,000 years ago. The first archaeological evidence for humans controlling fire include burnt bones, flint fragments, hand axes, lumps of heated clay, and heated rocks formed in hearth-like patterns. Biological evidence often takes on the form of fossil records showing changes in the human anatomy and the use of radiocarbon dating to estimate when these changes occurred. The australopithecines, an early form of nonhuman ancestors, walked upright. Then, a new species, the habilines, appeared. The habilines connect the gap between apes and humans. They had a mixture of pre-human and human characteristics including a larger brain and their ability to climb trees effectively. Eventually, a line of habilines evolved into the species Homo erectus, who shared several of the traits of Homo sapiens, except that they had smaller brains. Wrangham’s book, Catching Fire, argues that cooking is responsible for the human evolution of smaller body organs, for the increase in brain size, and for the division of labor by sex. It is is easier to digest cooked food than raw food. Foods that are softer and tender requires less energy consumption. In an experiment with rats, the group that was fed softer cereal showed a 30% increase in abdominal fat than the control group that was fed with regular cereal (Wrangham, 77). Obesity occurred as a result of lower costs of digestion. When humans began to eat cooked food, natural selection favored those with smaller guts. The increase in energy efficiency enabled humans to evolve with larger brains. During the appearance of Homo erectus, the volume of the brain increased by about 33% (Wrangham, 116). Humans could

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Andrea Silvera HIS 012 A02 October 19, 2018 spend less energy in their digestive system and use it to fuel their brain. Since most humans live in groups, it is beneficial to have greater social intelligence, useful in outwitting enemies, finding a mate, and create alliances with other members. However, the special alliance formed between a man and a woman gave rise to the sexual division of labor. Each gender made different, but complementary contributions to the household economy. Men generally went hunting while women gathered the food staples. For example, within the Hadza tribe from northern Tanzania, the women gathered and baked a pile of ekwa (roots) to have ready for her husband while the men went with their bows and arrows to hunt for animal meat (Wrangham, 131-132). Although a man and a woman brought back different foods, they each ate from their partner’s finds as well as their own findings. The sexual division of labor encouraged formation of familial bonds and productivity. It allowed men and women to become more skilled at their tasks, creating efficient use of time and resources. Experimentation with fire for cooking has changed humans both physically and socially. These alterations include development of small guts and large brains as well as inspire the sexual division of labor. Due to the incorporation of interdisciplinary evidence and analysis, Wrangham’s argument is convincing. Ranging from anthropological to biological evidence, the argument provides a comprehensive model as to how humans have evolved from our early ancestors. Cooked food has led to lower digestive efforts, enabling humans to have smaller guts and repurpose some of the energy to fuel their brains. This meant an increase in the volume of the brain size. Not only was cooking efficient on a biological level, but also on a societal level where men and women worked together to provide food and share their findings.

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