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From, uh, 2013. And the book, Catching Fire, mentioned in the article and from which most of the info is gleaned is from 2010. The scholar in the article, Rich
by igravious 9y ago
From, uh, 2013.
And the book, Catching Fire, mentioned in the article and from which most of the info is gleaned is from 2010. The scholar in the article, Richard Wrangham, wrote the book.
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari doesn't push the domestication of fire as far back as 1.8 million years as Wrangham does but it does note that the chimpanzee brain uses 6% of the body's energy at rest, while according to the article "A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain". The hypothesis is that only cooking could have provided this boost. Shorter gut, bigger brain. It's a fascinating conjecture. The question is, did we develop sophisticated language before domesticating fire or vice-versa. Perhaps the synthesised creation myths of all the world's cultures and religions could provide a clue?
- thijser 9y agoRegarding the timescale this is about, what does it matter that the article is 5 years old?
- igravious 9y agoOnly that normally we put the year in the title of the post like this (2013) so that people know it's a few years old. That's all, not that the info is out of date or anything.
- abrowne 9y agoWhich is useful if, like me, you guessed whose work this was going to be about (I took an anthro class in college with one of his former grad students) and hoped it would be a follow-up, not the same book.