The evolutionary origins of human nature

On this week's Science Saturday John Horgan interviewsRichard Wrangham. The second half of the conversation focuses on Wrangham's new book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. I've heard pieces of the arguments mooted in the back & forth before, but it looks like in this book they're all brought together. Humans are a large animal with a very small gut, so we need to maximize the bang-for-the buck when it comes to what we eat. Unlike gorillas and to a lesser extent chimpanzees we just aren't able to process enough low quality vegetable matter to keep ourselves going. Part of this also might be due to the fact that we have some serious energetic needs, our outsized brains require a lot of energy to keep them chugging along (as anyone with low blood sugar can tell you), and I also recall that our bipedal locomotion isn't quite as efficient ...