WHICH CAME FIRST: COOKING OR PATRIARCHY? Review of Richard Wrangham. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

Richard Wrangham has written another elegantly written and argued book. His thesis is encapsulated in his subtitle. Using a variety of data, he argues that humans developed cooking much earlier than previously thought, approximately two million years ago. Cooking allowed humans to develop large brains, to specialize in hunting, to pair bond, and facilitated sharing resources between mates and non-kin. In short, cooking allowed us to become unique among the primates .