Culture
24 min
Why We Cook: The Invention That Made Us Human
Fire didn't just feed us. It literally built the human brain.
No other animal cooks. And no other animal has a brain this large relative to its body. Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham argues these two facts are deeply connected: cooking unlocked the calories that funded our enormous brains, trading gut for gray matter in the most consequential transaction in evolutionary history.
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About Mythio
One story, one sitting.
Mythio is a library of audio documentaries on the ideas, people, and events that shaped the world. Each episode is researched across the best sources, fact-checked, and told in full. Most run twenty to thirty minutes, long enough to go deep, short enough to finish in one sitting.