Human adaptation to the control of fire

By R. Wrangham, Rachel N. Carmody. 2010

266 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Charles Darwin attributed human evolutionary success to three traits. Our social habits and anatomy were important, he said, but the critical feature was our intelligence, because it led to so much else, including such traits as language, weapons, tools, boats, and the control of fire. Among these, he opined, the control of fire was ‘‘probably the greatest ever [discovery] made by man, excepting language.’’ Despite this early suggestion that the control of fire was even more important than tool use for human success, recent anthropologists have made only sporadic efforts to assess its evolutionary significance. Here we use recent developments in understanding the role of cooked food in human diets to support the spirit of Darwin’s offhand remark. We first consider the role of fire in increasing the net caloric value of cooked foods compared to raw foods, and hence in accounting for the unique pattern of human digestion. We then review the compelling evidence that humans are biologically adapted to diets that include cooked food, and that humans have a long evolutionary history of an obligate dependence on fire. Accordingly, we end by considering the influence of fire on various aspects of human biology. We pay particular attention to life history, and also briefly discuss effects on anatomy, behavior, and cognition.

Subfields: Anthropology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/841220a6dae305f31df0e9c2fae76a6d8ab16665

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In Anthropology

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Earliest fire in Africa: towards the convergence of archaeological evidence and the cooking hypothesis (2013, background): “A shift to ground-sleeping is hard to explain without the protective effects of the control of fire (Wrangham 2009; Wrangham and Carmody 2010).”
Synthesis, part of a Special Feature on Exploring Social-Ecological Resilience through the Lens of the Social Sciences: Contributions, Critical Reflections, and Constructive Debate Conceptualizing power to study social-ecological interactions (2016, background): “…and end points of the domestication of fire, which some claim lie 1.5–2 million years ago (for a debate, see Clark and Harris 1985, Wrangham 2009, Wrangham and Carmody 2010, Sandgathe et al. 2011, Speth 2015), Goudsblom (2015) argues that the mobilization of fire as a source of power occurred…”
Humans and Scavengers: The Evolution of Interactions and Ecosystem Services (2014, background): “This could have contributed further to larger body and brain sizes (Wrangham and Carmody 2010, Aiello and Antón 2012, Antón and Snodgrass 2012), which perhaps facilitated hunting success.”