Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

I also just finished Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham, who is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University so I hope that means he isn't some quack. The thesis of the book, which I find very interesting and very plausible, is that it was the use of fire to cook food that led to the development of the human species, allowing them time away from chewing. He emphasizes that digestion of raw foods is quite time and energy consuming and that raw foods cannot provide the calories that cooked food does. Cooking makes both plant and animal foods more digestible. Because humans did not have to have large jaws and guts for digesting raw foods, our mouths, teeth and intestines became smaller, while our brain capacity increased. It's a good thesis and explains why we have an obesity epidemic today: we are naturally attracted to refined foods.