This past Spring Semester at Indiana University I wrote a research paper for a bioanthropology class exploring Richard Wrangham's hypothesis about the origins of cooking and its impact on human evolution.

Before reading his book "Catching Fire", I thought that his ideas couldn't be any further from the truth. But after reading his compelling argument, I realized that there really may be more to human evolution than we think, and that (this is where I build off of Wrangham's book) some of the main foods that humans have become adapted to eating my in fact not be the healthiest for us, but instead allowed us to survive just long enough to pass on our genes, or reproduce. This anomaly between health and adaptation, I believe, is only present in Homo sapiens sapiens, or anatomically modern humans, and this will be explored in greater detail in a future paper. For now, at least get an understanding on how the environment of the precursors to modern humans could have possibly impacted some of our physiological and anatomical adaptations to food.

You can download the PDF HERE