Richard Wrangham's new book is an expansion of a provocative hypothesis about human history that he and his colleagues first published in 1999. Cleverly evoking anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss's work The Raw and the Cooked, the article was entitled 'The Raw and the Stolen: Cooking and the Ecology of Human Origins' Wrangham restates his hypothesis concisely and elegantly at the outset of Catching Fire:rn"I believe the transformative moment that gave rise to the genus Homo, one of the great transitions in the history of life, stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals.
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