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 ...

Kiss the cook — because she's responsible for most of human evolution, according to Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham. Wrangham talks with host Jacki Lyden about his new book, Catching Fire: How ...

The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club. But that’s not stopping Professor Richard Wrangham. The biological anthropology professor and co-author of “Demonic Males: Apes and the ...

Wrangham (Catching Fire), a biological anthropologist at Harvard, undertakes a thorough and persuasive examination of this paradoxical observation: “we can be the nastiest of species and also the ...

In the past century, millions of humans have died at the hands of other humans through mass genocides, serial killings, wars and nuclear devastation. As a rule, however, people today are markedly less ...

The 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth has prompted a lot of reflection this year on how our understanding of evolution has progressed since the introduction of his theory. One persistent ...

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 ...

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 ...