Did Cooking Make Us Human?
Origin Stories
Meredith Johnson
4.8 • 554 Ratings
🗓️ 29 December 2015
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We humans have evolved very differently from other primates. Is there one thing responsible for humans becoming human? Some evolutionary biologists think that the way we process our food, namely cooking it, could explain why our species developed so differently from others. Did cooking make us human? Dr. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University and Dr. Rachel Carmody of UCSF and Harvard discuss the impact that cooked food has had on human evolution.
This episode of Origin Stories was produced by Briana Breen and edited by Audrey Quinn. Music by Henry Nagle.
Thanks to Richard Wrangham and Rachel Carmody for sharing their work.
Links
Richard Wrangham's Harvard University Website
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
Smithsonian Magazine "Why Fire Made Us Human"
Rachel Carmody's Nature article: Diet rapidly and reproducibly alters the human gut microbiome
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. I'm Meredith Johnson. |
| 0:24.8 | We modern humans have evolved in ways that are clearly different from the other living great apes. We have these big, complex brains, |
| 0:30.8 | small teeth and jaws, and much smaller guts. Some evolutionary biologists think the key to these |
| 0:37.1 | differences might be found in something that we all do every day. |
| 0:40.3 | Reporter Breonna Breen takes a look at the origins of cooking. |
| 0:44.3 | Mr. Theo, did you have a good nap? |
| 0:48.3 | Did you? |
| 0:50.3 | I know it's almost time for you to eat. |
| 0:53.3 | This is Rachel Carmody and her son Theo. Rachel spends a lot of I know it's almost time for you to eat. |
| 0:56.9 | This is Rachel Carmody and her son Theo. |
| 1:01.8 | Rachel spends a lot of time thinking about food, but not in the way you and I probably do. |
| 1:04.7 | What? Are you hungry? |
| 1:15.6 | I'm currently a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF in microbiology, but I'm also a visiting fellow in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. Aww. |
| 1:17.6 | I think you're making sad sounds because you're hungry. |
| 1:22.6 | This is my son, Theo. He is 12 weeks old and he will be weaned on to cooked food because of all the benefits |
| 1:33.6 | that it provides in terms of softening the food and being easily digestible. |
| 1:38.2 | But right now you don't have any teeth at all, so you're just getting breast milk. |
| 1:47.4 | He's bussy because he's hungry. |
| 1:50.7 | Can you tell me what you had for breakfast? |
| 1:53.4 | I had bacon and coffee, and that's it. |
| 1:57.3 | With a newborn, you don't get a lot of time to make a complex breakfast. |
| 2:06.6 | Nutritionally, it's probably not the best choice, but it tastes so good. Rachel looks at how nutrition relates to human evolution. The reason she's focused on this area is because of one person. My name is Richard Rangham. I'm a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University, |
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