This NY Times article discusses an interesting approach in anthropology, determining when humans started to cook their food and correlating expected body changes and social behaviors. Anthropologist Dr. Richard W. Wrangham postulates that the advent of cooking was 2 million years ago, 1.5 million years earlier than the standard belief. There’s no evidence for skeletal changes at the time where most believe humans started cooking their food, but Homo Erectus had the smaller teeth, gut, rib cage, and larger females that could point to a shift to a cooking lifestyle. Wrangham prefers the cooking theory as cause for the evolution to Homo Erectus rather than the common view that the changes resulted from the hunting of big game. Why smaller teeth if they were eating more raw meat? Why did the Homo Erectus female evolve to be substantially larger but not the male? Did cooking help create monogamy and the family unit? The arguments, listed in detail in the article, are fascinating to think through, but don’t have strong supporting evidence. Better tests are being developed to determine how long ago men made their own fires. Regardless of whether Wrangham is correct that cooking started with early Homo Erectus, the approach is fresh and provides new theories for anthropologists to sink their little teeth into.