Darwin overlooked the most crucial step in human development, says primatologist Richard Wrangham. Some 1.8 million years ago, our ape-like ancestors underwent a dramatic change in physical appearance ...

In Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, primatologist Richard Wrangham argues that cooking gave early humans an advantage over other primates, leading to larger brains and more free time.

THE GOODNESS PARADOX: THE STRANGE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VIRTUE AND VIOLENCE IN HUMAN EVOLUTION By Richard Wrangham Pantheon Books, $27.95, 400 pages Many of us think that on the whole human beings are ...

The whole interview with Richard Wrangham, biological anthropologist and author of The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, in which I was trying ...

Rachel Newcomb is an anthropologist and the Diane and Michael Maher Distinguished Professor of Teaching and Learning at Rollins College. She is the author of “Everyday Life in Global Morocco.” In the ...

Richard Wrangham is co-author of Demonic Males (Houghton Mifflin, 1996) and a biological anthropology professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This website uses cookies to improve ...

There have been many writers, from Brillat-Savarin to modern-day food anthropologists, who have remarked that cooking is a defining aspect of our humanity. These assertions have typically formed the ...

Did the modern human species arise after our ancestors started cooking their food? In his new book, "Catching Fire", Richard Wrangham argues that is was the practice of cooking food that was central ...

Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human is no half-baked theory of evolution, finds Simon Ings Just over two and a half million years ago, our brains swelled. Less than a million ...