How cooking led to evolution of man

Abu Dhabi: Kalima, the translation project of the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (Adach), has published the Arabic translation of the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, written by Richard Wrangham.

The book presents a new theory on cooking, based on two basic ideas: the first is that cooking and the transition from eating raw to cooked food is the reason for the evolution of man from early primitiveness to the stage of homo sapiens. The second is that cooking food gave humans extra energy and helped them reduce the size of their digestive system, leading to an increase in the growth of their brains, and providing everyone with extra free time (which would have been otherwise spent in digesting food), time that is useful for more hunting and developing new relationships.

Darwin's theory

Wrangham's theory is seen as a response to Darwin views on evolution and the concept put forward by Claude Levi-Strauss on the raw and the cooked.

The author, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University since 1989, was born in Britain in 1948. He received a bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of Oxford in 1970 and a doctorate in zoology from the University of Cambridge in 1975. His PhD thesis is titled Behavioural Ecology of Chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania.

He has written a number of research papers and books. The book was translated by Professor Falah Rahim, head of English Department at the Faculty of Applied Sciences in Sur in Oman.

Translations

He was born in Iraq in 1956, and earned a bachelor's degree in English from the Faculty of Arts, University of Baghdad in 1978 and a master's degree in English Literature from the Faculty of Arts, University of Baghdad in 1989. He has been translating since 1978 and has translated a number of books into Arabic