In this stunningly original book, Richard Wrangham argues that it was cooking that caused the extraordinary transformation of our ancestors from apelike beings to Homo erectus. At the heart of ''Catching Fire'' lies an explosive new idea: the habit of eating cooked rather than raw food permitted the digestive tract to shrink and the human brain to grow, helped structure human society, and created the male-female division of labour. As our ancestors adapted to using fire, humans emerged as 'the cooking apes'. Covering everything from food-labelling and overweight pets to raw-food faddists, ''Catching Fire'' offers a startlingly original argument about how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today.