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Richard Wrangham

8 min read

The Man Who Thinks Cooking Made Us Human

Here's a question that might change how you think about your next meal: What if the most important invention in human history wasn't the wheel, or writing, or even fire itself—but the simple act of cooking food?

Richard Wrangham has spent decades arguing exactly this. The English anthropologist, born in Leeds in 1948, has built a career asking uncomfortable questions about what makes us human. His answers often involve violence, our relationship with other primates, and surprisingly, the kitchen.

From Gombe to Harvard

Wrangham's journey into these questions began in one of the most famous research sites in scientific history. As a graduate student, he worked at Jane Goodall's long-term chimpanzee field study in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. His mentors were giants: Robert Hinde, the influential ethologist, and Goodall herself, whose patient observations revolutionized our understanding of primate behavior.

The chimps of Gombe weren't just research subjects. They were windows into our own past.

During this period, Wrangham also befriended Dian Fossey, another legendary primatologist, and helped her establish what would become the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund—originally called the Digit Fund, named after a beloved silverback gorilla killed by poachers. These connections placed Wrangham at the center of a small group of scientists who were fundamentally changing how we understand our closest relatives.

After years at the University of Michigan, Wrangham landed at Harvard, where he became the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology. Today he co-directs the Kibale Chimpanzee Project, a long-running study of chimpanzees in Uganda's Kibale National Park. The chimps there, known as the Kanyawara community, have been observed for decades, their lives documented in painstaking detail.

The Violence Problem

In 1996, Wrangham published a book that would make him famous—and controversial. Written with journalist Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence tackled one of the most disturbing aspects of human nature: our capacity for aggression.

The central argument was stark. Male violence, the authors claimed, isn't just cultural. It's not something we learn. It's wired into our genes, a trait we share most notably with chimpanzees. Rape, warfare, murder—these aren't aberrations. They're part of our evolutionary inheritance.

The book landed like a grenade.

Reviews appeared everywhere: The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of Military History, Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. The mainstream press called it readable, entertaining, fascinating. The book did important work documenting what the data clearly showed: lethal violence is overwhelmingly a male trait.

But specialists were harsher. Some primatologists, biologists, and anthropologists attacked the book as oversimplified. One reviewer called it "titillating and simplistic." Others accused it of being unscientific, filled with what one critic memorably described as "classic tropes of quackery."

The most provocative moment came in the book's proposed solution. To address male violence, Wrangham and Peterson suggested, perhaps only half-seriously, that humans could systematically breed "a kinder, gentler man." They acknowledged the obvious problem: women, research suggested, often prefer what they termed "male demonism."

Two decades later, Wrangham returned to these themes in The Goodness Paradox, published in 2019. The title captures the puzzle he was wrestling with: How can the same species capable of extraordinary kindness also commit horrific violence? The book explored how humans might have essentially domesticated themselves, becoming simultaneously gentler and more capable of organized cruelty.

The Cooking Hypothesis

Wrangham's most influential idea, though, involves your stove.

In Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, published in 2009, he proposed something radical. Cooking, he argued, wasn't just a nice cultural innovation. It was obligatory. Our bodies evolved to require cooked food.

Think about what cooking does. It breaks down proteins through a process called denaturation, making them easier to digest. It gelatinizes starches, transforming them from tough plant materials into soft, absorbable nutrients. It kills pathogens, making food safer. In laboratory experiments, Wrangham and his colleagues demonstrated that cooked food delivers more usable energy than raw food—significantly more.

Now consider the fossil record. About 1.8 million years ago, something dramatic happened to our ancestors. Their brains got bigger. Their teeth and jaws got smaller. The difference in body size between males and females decreased. Something fundamental had changed.

The conventional explanation points to meat-eating. Early humans started hunting and scavenging, the theory goes, and this protein-rich diet fueled brain growth while reducing the need for massive jaws and grinding teeth.

Wrangham offered an alternative. What if it was cooked food—particularly cooked tubers, underground storage organs like roots and bulbs—that drove these changes? Raw tubers are tough, fibrous, and hard to digest. Cooked tubers are soft, calorie-dense, and easy to process.

The implications are profound. If Wrangham is right, cooking isn't just something humans do. It's something that made us human in the first place.

Not everyone is convinced. Some anthropologists point out that the archaeological evidence for controlled fire use that early is thin. Fire is hard to detect in the fossil record, and many researchers believe reliable cooking came much later than 1.8 million years ago. The debate continues.

What Chimps Teach Us

Throughout his career, Wrangham has been instrumental in identifying behaviors once thought uniquely human in our closest relatives.

Take culture. We used to think humans were the only animals who passed learned behaviors from generation to generation, creating traditions that varied from group to group. Wrangham's work helped establish that chimpanzees do this too. Different chimp communities use different tools, practice different customs, have different ways of doing things. These aren't genetic differences. They're cultural ones.

Even more surprising is chimpanzee self-medication. Working with ethnobotanist Eloy Rodriguez, Wrangham documented chimps deliberately seeking out and consuming plants with medicinal properties when they were sick. The chimps weren't just eating—they were treating themselves.

These discoveries matter because they force us to reconsider the line between human and animal. The more we learn about chimpanzees, the less special we seem—and the more we understand about where our own behaviors came from.

The Personal Cost of Watching Violence

Studying violence changes you.

Wrangham has spent forty years watching chimpanzees hurt and kill each other. He's documented the raids, the attacks, the brutal enforcement of territorial boundaries. He's seen what happens when bands of males encounter vulnerable individuals from neighboring groups.

It's impossible to watch this and remain unchanged. For four decades, Wrangham has not eaten meat.

He married Elizabeth Ross in 1980, and they have three sons. The man who has written more than almost anyone about male violence raised three boys. One wonders what bedtime conversations in that household were like.

Teaching the Next Generation

At Harvard, Wrangham doesn't just research—he teaches. His courses in the Human Evolutionary Biology department tackle some of the most sensitive topics imaginable.

One course focuses on primate social behavior, covering the complex webs of alliance, conflict, cooperation, and competition that characterize ape societies. Another, co-taught with Professor Diane Rosenfeld from Harvard Law School, examines theories of sexual coercion. It's a course that sits at the intersection of biology, law, and social justice—exactly the kind of uncomfortable territory Wrangham has always been willing to explore.

In 2008, he took on another role: House Master of Currier House, one of Harvard's undergraduate residences. The position put him in daily contact with students outside the classroom, a different kind of primatology altogether.

The Big Picture

What emerges from Wrangham's work is a portrait of humanity that's neither flattering nor despairing. We are violent animals—but we're also capable of extraordinary cooperation. We evolved as killers—but we also evolved as cooks, as culture-bearers, as creatures who domesticated ourselves.

The cooking hypothesis, in particular, offers a surprisingly optimistic message. If Wrangham is right, what made us human wasn't something aggressive or competitive. It was something almost domestic: gathering around a fire, sharing food, transforming raw nature into something nourishing and communal.

Maybe the most important technology in human history wasn't a weapon at all. Maybe it was a hearth.

A Legacy of Difficult Questions

Wrangham's career has been defined by his willingness to ask questions others find uncomfortable. Are humans naturally violent? Is aggression in our genes? Did cooking make us who we are? What can chimpanzees tell us about ourselves?

He's been criticized for oversimplifying, for sensationalizing, for drawing conclusions that outrun his evidence. Some of those criticisms are probably fair. Science advances through argument, and Wrangham has certainly provoked plenty of that.

But he's also forced us to confront things we'd rather not think about. The violence in our nature. The deep roots of behaviors we like to think we've outgrown. The uncomfortable kinship we share with creatures who hunt their neighbors and beat their mates.

And he's reminded us of something else, too. Sometimes the most transformative technologies aren't the flashy ones. Sometimes they're the ones so old and so fundamental we've forgotten they were ever invented at all.

Tonight, when you cook dinner, you're doing something no other animal does. You're also doing something your ancestors have done for at least hundreds of thousands of years—and possibly much longer. According to Richard Wrangham, you're doing the thing that made you human in the first place.