How Cooking Made Us Human

As you cook that perfect steak or roast for dinner (or even pick up a takeaway chicken if you must), you are doing what comes naturally.

Did you know that it's currently estimated that Homo sapiens (that's us) and our ancestors, connections and offshoots from Homo erectus to Neanderthals have been cooking meat for dinner for around 1.9 million years.

Harvard's Prof. Richard Wrangham in his book, Catching Fire: How cooking made us human, persuasively argues that it was cooking that facilitated our evolution from ape to human. Cooking makes a huge difference to diet and lifestyle - it softens the food and dramatically reduces eating time. Harvard researchers recently calculated that if we lived like our non-cooking primate cousins, we'd spend about 48 per cent of the day eating. But we spend only about 5 per cent of the day tucking into our meals and snacks. So when our ancestors invented cooking, it gave them a major survival advantage.

"Cooked food does many familiar things,' says Wrangham. "It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food. The extra energy gave the first cooks biological advantages.

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