I have read my way back through Catching Fire for a second time, making copious underlinings with a pencil, and I think I have a much better understanding and appreciation of the book now. I think my problem before was that the tone of the book sounded like pure hypothesis, with no direct scientific or archaeological confirmation. However I now think that the author actually does a very good job with his hypothesizes, trying to relate them it to reasonable verifiable facts and relationships wherever possible, often to what we know in the field of evolutionary anthropology. With science, hypothesis always comes first, and I now think this is a good one. Simply put, Control of Fire accounts for everything with respect to our evolution over the past 3 million years.
Here's the way I now see it. First of all you have a two-step jump between the last of the Australopithecines and the first Homo Erectus. That intermediate creature was Homo Habilis, originally thought to be the first toolmaker. Now, however, the thought is that Homo Habilis was also the first to make the jump to eating meat, and the additional energy gained from doing that enabled his brain to grow. His meat-eating was only supplemental to his plant eating and root eating at first, and he continued to be highly reliant on living in trees and sleeping in trees for safety. Therefore his body didn't change much and he still looked like an ape. But as time went on, with his bigger brain, he eventually figured out how to crudely process meat by hammering it and beating it and ultimately he may have stumbled into a primitive form of controlling fire, sort of a la Quest for Fire. As he got better and better with controlling fire, that enabled him to come down from out of the trees, lose his body hair, lose his tree climbing anatomy, and proceed with developing his lower body for long distance travel and better and better hunting abilities. The result was Homo Erectus.
Incidentally, the author speculates that it was a climate change that drove this change in the first place. The original Australopithecus actually went extinct because of climate change and was replaced by other versions of Australopithecus, one which excelled on serious plant and root eating in a changed environment (the Robustus) and the other which developed an alternative source of energy by eating meat in addition to what plant food could be found, and this resulted in Homo Habilis. You can see, this is the kind of speculation that made me uncomfortable on my first reading but now I think it is the only way to build a hypothesis with this distant pre-archaeological finding era.
So, by the time Homo Erectus had fully emerged the stage was set, so to speak. The body that we have today, below the neck, was in place with very little change over the next 2 million years. From then on it was mainly a matter of increasing brain size and that enabled the endless fine-tuning and improvement of evolution over time. Control of fire came first, but cooking was integral to all of the cultural adaptations that came later. An argument can be made for the whole structure of hunter-gatherer society and the role of men and women as being an outgrowth of our reliance on cooking.
These evolutionary changes from Australopithecus, through Homo Habilis, through Homo Erectus, and finally to Homo Sapiens are among the largest changes in the shortest period of time ever noted for any species. They all are driven by the discovery of better and better sources of food energy, for our physical engine, and by related cultural adaptations that helped us reproduce and survive. Only recently have we run into a problem where the foods we have evolved to like are now being served up to us in excess and are being over-processed in addition. This is where the Paleo Diet is an attempt to get back on track. The author of this book doesn't go into that subject other than saying that we need to choose more real food and natural food.
One interesting side hypothesis the author makes, and he does it by relating our experience to other societies and other species, is the subservient role that women have been forced to take with respect to cooking and household chores. He speculates that eating cooked food has given us more free time in every day and the two sexes use that time differently. Men use it for additional hunting, if necessary, and that is good. But beyond that men don't take on any new chores, other than enjoyable things like hobbies and sports (in the modern era), with their free time. Women on the other hand have been forced to do the cooking and household work with their free time, and that situation is enforced and maintained by a patriarchal hierarchy that seems to be universal with all members of our genus. Enforced I guess because men are bigger and physically stronger than women (why is that?) There are many advantages to the division of labor between the sexes, including specialization and cooperation, and everyone benefits from this. But the fact remains that cooking and household work is considered a low status function and the male sex of our species has almost uniformly relegated this to females. Clearly this makes for some problems with the way our modern society has evolved, with women in the workplace. And this may all be changing going forward. I sense there is a lot of speculation about many of these new problems and situations, call them mismatches, from some of these books about evolutionary anthropology. No one knows for sure where we are headed except that some of these developments and trends are very new and clearly at odds with our evolutionary history.
Good book! Five star. Possibly requires two readings!
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Top reviews from other countries
Shane Neustaeter
Well thought & written, an excellent hypothesis.
Reviewed in Canada on February 19, 2024
Shane Neustaeter
Reviewed in Canada on February 19, 2024
An easy read, not dry, very well writen. I wasn't disapointed in any way. A must read for anyone who loves food, how it gave us power & how it has power over us!
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JAW
Qu'est ce qui différencie l'homme de l'animal ?
Reviewed in France on March 16, 2020