Thus the earliest antecedents to cooking as Wrangham envisions might have very likely been preceded by selective pressures that contributed to cooking being developed. Such selective forces may have already begun to transform social dynamics as you outline in terms of children-parent relations to nutrition. Rather than seeing cooking as a cuase of the division of sexual labour, it may be possible to consider such a division arose only after nutitional needs were satisfied. In other words, long after cooking had been established. Following your suggestion we might consider the intial stage of cooking to arise out of the mother-child dyadic relationship, and that as the infant becomes more independent, the dyadic relationship dissolves and so too does “cooking.” In short, the early stage of “cooking” (in only the sense of processing food) may have been applied only to the child’s nutition and not to the adult.

In my opinion the privileging of meat in anthropological analysis stems from the fact that it is primarily procured by men. That cooking is an activity primarily orchestrated by women could explain why it took so long to articulate an effective theory for its place in human evolution. For a very long time anthropologists simply did not consider female activities to be of great significance. Wrangham, however, does not explore “my” point in depth.

Wrangham does situate cooking in an increasingly complex tradition of food preparation. In effect it grew out of such techniques as pounding and chopping. But he argues that once cooking was discovered the practice would have spread rapidly. In effect, once there was cooking there was no going back, certainly not once adaptations to a cooked diet set in.

Yes, there are stages to consider too, the advent of cooking in containers for example. Wrangham intimates that such innovations may have contributed to further evolution of Homo, such as the emergence of Heidelbergensis.

Perhaps this is an irrelevant “amongthe” that doesn’t refute the main point. Perhaps not. Do we know for sure that women do all the cooking “amongthe” hunter gatherers? And that this has always been so?