The best popular science books I read are the ones that I'm constantly reminded of while just living my ordinary life, which in a way helps make the point of the author that cooking is a fundamental part of human life and has been for a long time. ( )

theory that learning to cook food sped evolution from habilines to Homo erectus and led to sex role division

This is good research but not a great book to read. Basically, an entire book making the case that cooking food enabled humans to become smarter, by trading longer time eating and physical structures required for digesting uncooked foods for higher intelligence. Other than that, it's a bunch of boring details. ( )

This book offers a compelling case for the idea that cooking is the main reason why we evolved from australopithecines to Homo erectus and then to Homo sapiens. It challenges at several points the mainstream notion that meat-eating was a keystone of (at least some parts of) this evolution, for having comparatively limited explanatory power. Besides the anatomical changes it uses cooking to explain some things I wouldn't have expected, such as marriage and the sexual division of labor.

I thought the point was generally well-argued and at the same time the book provided enough interesting bits to keep a wide audience interested. There are plenty of anecdotes (favorite example: the author adds tough leaves to a raw goat meat meal to test that they make chewing easier), and many references to actual studies in the endnotes for the true nerds.

It has a problem that might be unavoidable in this kind of pop-sci book: there's always a lot of uncertainty in modern science (especially in something with as little archeological evidence as fire), but, because the author wants to make their case as persuasive as possible, diverging points tend to be omitted or minimized. As a result, it's sometimes hard to know what's well established and what's controversial. For example, a core point in the book (why is the human brain so unusually large?) relies on the expensive tissue hypothesis. The author does note that it's a hypothesis, but there's no exploration of why it's still one, or how accepted it is in the field.
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Desde Darwin la evolución humana se ha atribuido a nuestra inteligencia y adaptabilidad. Pero en “En llamas”, el renombrado primatólogo Richard Wrangham presenta una alternativa sorprendente: nuestro éxito evolutivo es el resultado de la cocina. El cambio de alimentos crudos a alimentos cocidos fue el factor clave en la evolución humana. Una vez que se comenzó a cocinar, el tracto digestivo humano se contrajo y el cerebro creció. El tiempo, una vez dedicado a masticar alimentos crudos y duros, podría ser demandado para cazar y cuidar el campamento. La cocina se convirtió en la base para la unión de pareja y el matrimonio, creó el hogar e incluso condujo a una división sexual del trabajo. En resumen, una vez que nuestros antepasados se adaptaron al uso del fuego, la humanidad comenzó.