Project MUSE - Catching Wrangham: On the Mythology and the Science of Fire, Cooking, and Becoming Human On the Mythology and the Science of Fire, Cooking, and Becoming Human Gregory Schrempp (bio) Abstract Myth and science sometimes converge—nowhere more so than in scenarios concerning the domestication of fire and its consequences for human social life. I examine this claim through an analysis of bioanthropologist Richard Wrangham’s recent book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, comparing his claims and findings with those of mythologist/anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked. I examine myth-science convergences around the following topics: parochialism, narrative speculation, transformations attributed to cooking and fire, temporality in science and myth, and the human fascination with fire as a substance. As part of my analysis of temporality, I look at the projection, in both myth and science, of contemporary cultural contestations (such as gender issues and food debates) into an idealized species-formative moment set in the past.

Challenging the rhetorical tendency to invoke science and myth as opposites, I consider possible factors leading to convergence and suggest that science can enrich its perspective through a sympathetic attitude toward myth and other forms of traditional wisdom. But in deeper rocks the record of our humanity dwindles until around two million years ago, when it gives way to prehuman ancestors and leaves us with a question that every culture answers in a different way, but only science can truly decide. What made us human? —R , Catching Fire (2009 , 1–2) In the 1960s there was a notion in the air that science and mythology—and everything else for that matter—somehow mystically [End Page 109] converged. Even if this notion in the context of the sixties was not especially fruitful in coming to understand what we mean by either myth or science, it does point to a genuine and fascinating epistemological issue. Claims made in the name of science do sometimes converge with visions encountered in traditional and/or ancient mythologies, a fact that at the very least should make us wary of the familiar polemical use of myth and science as mutually exclusive polar terms.

No more striking instance of myth–science convergence can be found than in scenarios concerning the domestication of fire. I will illustrate and explore this claim through an analysis of the most recent major scientific work on the domestication of fire, Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009) . Wrangham, a bioanthropologist at Harvard University, argues that cooking formed the crucial factor in our becoming human, specifically by offering habilines (the “missing link” between apes and humans [2009, 4]) a source of easily chewable and digestible nutrition that permitted rapid brain growth, allowing the emergence of Homo erectus, the precursor to Homo sapiens. In the following analysis I will summarize the several ways in which Wrangham’s analysis dovetails with the story of the domestication of fire as it is proffered in traditional origin myths. Parochialism, Mythic and Scientific In contemporary popular discourse, no term conveys the quality of parochialism more persistently than myth; it does so through two related connotations, both stemming from the opposition between the provincial and the cosmopolitan.

1 First, myth is invoked to designate ideas from the cultural backwaters that have not passed the test of cosmopolitan science. But there is a second more interesting sense, in some respects inverse to the first, in which myth designates the parochial. Here, to be parochial means to be convinced that an idea that is actually widespread or even universal is uniquely one’s own—or, in the extreme, it means to regard oneself or one’s community as the originator of all that is humanly good and true. In regard to origin scenarios recounted in traditional mythologies, the charge of parochialism in this sense may be legitimate, for there are few origin myths that, within their narrative, admit that they are made of borrowed material—although in most cases they probably are, at least to a degree. It was, I believe, Alfred Kroeber who pointed out that the one [End Page 110] thing humans do more readily than borrow from others’ cultures is to forget that they have done so. For this kind of parochialism it is almost as though an idea does not exist in the world until one has declared oneself to have invented it. How different is science in this respect?

Wrangham details different precursors to his ideas about the significance of cooking in human adaptation, citing three main kinds of predecessors. One antecedent is the work of fellow scientists who have studied human biological and cultural evolution; specifically, Wrangham distinguishes his own arguments from previous hypotheses about meat-eating and cooking, as when he pronounces the 1995 theories of Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler to be right in principle but wrong in specifics (2009, 114ff.). Wrangham also cites the views of gastronomists and food historians, whom he sees as having perceptive views about the relation of cooking to a felt sense of humanity. He first mentions early nineteenth-century French gastronomist Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, whose comments on the importance of cooking Wrangham juxtaposes with another nineteenth-century thinker, Charles Darwin—who saw cooking as important but not pivotal (2009, 9–14). Wrangham prefers the gastronomist’s views on this matter to those of Darwin. Brillat-Savarin was prescient in tracing a link from cooking to households, but his ideas were not richly developed.

They were throwaway lines hidden in a voluminous output, and they have never been taken seriously. (2009, 12) Finally, Wrangham brings in—indeed by two different routes—a third kind of predecessor for the idea that cooking was significant to the origin of humanity: world mythology. Wrangham references the mythology of cooking by citing The Raw and the Cooked, a modern-classic book by the late French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss on myths of humans first acquiring cooking fire; Lévi-Strauss’s work opens with the fire myths of South American Indian societies but reaches out to many other parts of the world. Interestingly, Lévi-Strauss blends into his treatment of mythology characteristics of the two other kinds of predecessors cited by Wrangham. For Lévi-Strauss displays his own (typically French?) sort of gastronomic enthusiasm, punctuating his analysis of world mythology with disquisitions on methods of cooking, gustatory customs, and the cultural messages encoded in both. Moreover, Lévi-Strauss maintains what is, [End Page 111] in his own mind at least, a modern scientific perspective and rhetoric.

2 Following Freud (who was in turn strongly influenced by Darwin), Lévi-Strauss was intrigued early in his career by the prospect of locating a pivotal point of transition from pre-human to human, from “nature” to “culture.” Later, Lévi-Strauss concluded that the very idea of such a moment was a product of human anthropocentric ideology and examined the fire myth as a possible vehicle of such ideology—a perspective that leaves him in disfavor with some evolutionary scientists, including, it would seem, Wrangham himself (more on this below). But the presence of mythology in Catching Fire is not limited to Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked, for Wrangham also brings it in via a second route. Specifically, Wrangham’s opening epigram is a brief passage drawn from a rich section on fire mythology that occurs in a classic work on the Andaman Islanders by pioneering social anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Browne. The epigram reads: [Fire] provides us warmth on cold nights; it is the means by which they prepare their food, for they eat nothing raw save a few fruits . . .

the Andamanese believe it is the possession of fire that makes human beings what they are and distinguishes them from animals. (The Andaman Islanders, as quoted in Wrangham 2009 , 1) 3 On the next page Wrangham announces the “new answer” to the question “What made us human?” He writes, “I believe the transformative moment that gave rise to the genus Homo, one of the great transitions in the history of life, stemmed from the control of fire and the advent of cooked meals” (2009, 2). Especially in light of the Andaman Island view summarized in his own opening epigram, is it untowardly mytho-centric of me to raise an eyebrow at Wrangham’s proffering of his answer as “new”? True, the Andamanese answer (as conveyed by Radcliffe-Brown) does not insist on cooking (as opposed to fire in general) as the developmental pivot, and this is an important distinction to Wrangham.

But it should be noted that Lévi-Strauss’s reading of the traditional fire myth (mentioned above)—which Wrangham presents a few pages later and clearly takes seriously—does single out cooking as the focus of world mythological traditions. Convergences sometimes do occur between the answers offered by traditional mythologies and those put forward by modern science. When they do, the scientist is more inclined to see in mythology intriguing, pale adumbrations (useful as epigrammatic art-bites) of exciting new [End Page 112] scientific theories, while the mythologist is more inclined to see scientific discourses as new variants of old, poetically powerful tales. 4 Just how close are the scenarios of the origin of humanity offered by Wrangham’s evolutionary science, on the one hand, and by the traditional myth of cooking-fire as summarized by Lévi-Strauss, on the other?

It seems that Wrangham’s objection to the mythic summary presented by Lévi-Strauss has little, if anything, to do with the scenario itself; rather, it stems almost entirely from Lévi-Strauss’s claim that the mythic scenario represents a symbolic, “psychological” (2009, 11) reality rather than a literal, biological one. Indeed, as I will argue shortly, it is as if Wrangham, vexed at Lévi-Strauss’s dismissal of the scenario as merely “psychological,” sets out to show that the full scenario of the cooking myth is literally true and scientifically demonstrable. Wrangham writes: “Lévi-Strauss was an elite anthropologist, and his implication that cooking had no biological meaning was widely touted. No one challenged this aspect of his analysis” (12). Wrangham’s biological slant on the topic of humanity provides the most obvious clue as to why he regards the answers proposed in his book as “new” (vis-à-vis what mythologies and gastronomists have had to say).

For Wrangham, the question “What made us human?” appears to be synonymous with the question “What factors gave rise to the genus Homo?”—even though the subtitle of his book is not “how cooking gave rise to the genus Homo,” but rather “how cooking made us human.” An answer that identifies the interdependent characteristics that constitute our genus differentia but does not use the fossil record to demonstrate a correlation with the emergence of Homo as a new genus, would not seem, for Wrangham, to count as an answer at all. Wrangham as much as says that gastronomists and food writers got the connection between cooking and humanity before scientists did; but then he adds that since the former did not understand how cooking affects nutrition or when it evolved, their ideas “were not tied down to biological reality” (2009, 13). One can surmise from Wrangham’s opening epigram that at least one strand of his attitude toward mythology might be similar to his attitude toward gastronomists: mythology offers ingenious insights, but is hardly scientific. But if there is such a strand in Wrangham’s view of mythology, there would also seem to be another, opposite strand as well.

(The combination would be unsurprising; ever since Plato pronounced his views on the matter, Western thinking about mythology has been [End Page 113] dominated by ambivalence.) Within some scientific discourses, notably contemporary popularizing works, science is cast rhetorically as the nemesis of myth, which therefore must be overcome. After the epigram noted above, Wrangham begins his book with these lines: The question is old: Where do we come from? The ancient Greeks told of human shapes being molded by gods out of clay. We know now that our bodies were molded by natural selection and that we come from Africa. (2009, 1) Here we have a rather standard opening formula for popularizing works of science, namely, a summary of what traditional origin myths tell us about a topic, followed by an explanation of why these are wrong in light of what we now know from science—in other words, a terse illustration of science’s mission to dispatch myth.

5 Is it possible that Wrangham is so familiar with this usage—in which science and myth form an oppositional pair, the one as heir-designate of the other—that between the end of the epigram and the beginning of the book proper he has already forgotten that what traditional mythologies say about fire is, in general drift, consonant with what he will propose in the name of science? Narrative Speculation In conjecturing about why Wrangham regards the answer he proposes as new, another possibility that comes to mind is that within the milieu of science a proposed “answer” cannot count as such until it is scientifically phrased—that is, presented as a hypothesis testable through methods recognized as scientific. I do not count the critique I offer here as part of the “postmodern assault on science,” and I do not contest that science has made possible, through new methods and observational instruments, knowledge about the physical world that could not be had without them. Having granted these points, however, I will insist that the distinction between a scientifically formalized evidence-based speculation, on the one hand, and a “mythic” speculation, on the other, is not absolute.

Contemporary and archaic huntergatherers admittedly have not had available the sorts of evidence provided by the archaeological record or modern genetics, but these are not the only lines of evidence drawn upon by Wrangham. Let us consider two other forms of evidence he invokes, both of which have been available to the myth-makers of the world. [End Page 114] One of these is observations of the workings—including costs and benefits—of fire and cooking in everyday life, ranging from very basic roles in providing warmth and allowing a ground-based way of life (as opposed to having to sleep in trees for protection), to more abstract considerations such as the role of cooking in sexual partnering, divisions of labor, food distribution norms, and social alliances. In discussing such matters, Wrangham relies heavily on the observations of ethnographers (e.g., 2009, 147ff.). With regard to this line of evidence, my point is elementary: observations of the kind that have been made by professional ethnographers were also surely made, and backed with more depth and longitude, by the peoples they have studied.

Such “indigenous” observations no doubt fed and still feed into traditional fire mythologies—into the mythological answer to the question of what made us human. A second, more intriguing line of evidence cited by Wrangham is quite different, and lies inside us. One of the praise-blurbs on the back of Wrangham’s book is by television celebrity grillmaster Steven Raichlen, host of Primal Grill and author of The Barbecue Bible. Raichlen asks how we evolved from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens and informs us that the answer “can be found at your barbecue grill.” The blurb may be more than a bit of harmless fun; in attempting to bolster his claim for the importance of cooking in human evolution, Wrangham points out that humans and many other species spontaneously prefer cooked food to raw, a predilection he interprets as “an innate mechanism for recognizing high-energy foods” (2009, 91).

Any such taste-test confirmation of our evolutionary path has certainly been available to mythmakers, and it happens to converge with one of Lévi-Strauss’s claims about the relation of mythology and science, namely, that the logic of the senses, as it informs mythologies and traditional systems of magic, sometimes dovetails with the findings of Western science. 6 There is a popular inclination to equate myth with “fantasy” or with indifference to empirical reality, but this is a false equation. Most traditional mythologies contain very acute observations about the properties of the physical world even though the assumptions under which those observations are synthesized may differ from those of Western evolutionary science. Whether or not the synthesizing assumptions of Western science are ultimately superior to those of traditional mythologies, such science has not yet left behind the necessity for speculative leaps; this is especially so in fields (such as archaeology) that take it upon themselves to create macro-narratives out of very limited evidence. Quantitative [End Page 115] analysis, one of the hallmarks of scientific inquiry, often takes on an ambiguous character in such fields.

Wrangham cites a number of “cost” factors relevant to cost/benefit analysis: cooking has negative nutritional consequences as well as positive ones; cooking is a labor-intensive activity; an enlarged brain is a calorie-gulping organ (see 2009, 38ff., 80ff., 109ff.). A convincing quantitative analysis of the benefits over costs of a cooking diet would have to combine all nutritional alternatives open to a given species at any given evolutionary moment into a single multivariate calculation that proved a total gain in adaptive efficiency. This sort of calculation is never provided. Make no mistake about how Wrangham closes the loop: in the absence of precise calculations we have a deductive logic that appeals to the correctness of the evolutionary view—and specifically to the principle that “[n]atural selection mostly generates exquisitely successful designs” (38)—allowing us to speculate about the ways in which documented or reconstructed evolutionary events must, after all, be adaptively exquisite.

7 To the extent that we conclude that such adaptations are exquisite, the heroes (mythic and otherwise) are the myth-makers who figured these adaptations out by living them—so that scientists could later come along and crunch the numbers to confirm their exquisiteness (with a little help from smuggled-in assumptions about the nature of evolutionary processes). I am certainly not the first to note that at least some of what we call anthropological theory is archaic and/or indigenous socio-logic or mytho-logic rephrased as Western science—or in other words, a case of science catching up to myth. Of course, the taste-test method mentioned above has its limitations, and they are the same for both myth and science. That we have a taste for something can be a shaky basis for saying that it marks a point of evolutionary transition. From an evolutionary point of view there is always the possibility that some proclivity that we might like to think of as pivotal is actually an epiphenomenal consequence, perhaps even an unbeneficial one, of some more important, beneficial proclivity. Nor can the taste-test method distinguish which from among the many things we like (or like about ourselves) might form a genuinely pivotal factor in an evolutionary transition.

In mythologies we sometimes find bipedalism connected with human origins, as in portrayals of lameness in humanity newly emerged from the earth, 8 or, among the Maori and other peoples who portray the origin of humanity from Sky and Earth, in connection with the fact that [End Page 116] these first parents have not yet been adequately separated (see Schrempp 1992 , 126–32; cf. Numazawa 1984 ). In the latter accounts, the transformative event of the separation of Earth and Sky allowed our ancestors to move about and, according to some variants, to raise a pestle high enough to pound rice—which, as a food-softening alternative to cooking, also forms a counterpart to Wrangham’s claim that dietary shift toward more easily digestible food was the critical factor in the emergence of humanity. The role of opposable thumbs in this great transition is the only one of the “usual suspects” (diet, bepedalism, tool-use, language, and so on, as well as some outliers such as romantic love or the pleasure-bond) that I have encountered circulating as science for which I have not also come across a mythic counterpart.

Food writer Michael Pollan has an intriguing presence in Wrangham’s book. An endorsement by Pollan is the only praise-blurb to appear on the front cover, and Wrangham’s conclusion endorses some of Pollan’s views. Although by no means entirely dismissive, Pollan in his various works voices considerable skepticism toward food science, especially the analytical reductionism implicit in isolable, measurable “nutrients.” To these he counterposes “food,” along with rules for identifying it. In his Food Rules, Pollan recommends as his second rule (the first is “Eat food”) a shifting back of three generations (thus skipping over the era of “nutrition”): “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” (2009, 7). Although three generations does not take us back to the primordial times typically portrayed in origin myths, Pollan’s recommendation in its own way credits the possibility of a wisdom inhering in the practice of life, which in at least some instances might offer guidance superior to that of specialized science.

Indeed, regarding at least some (specifically, some of the cultural part) of what Wrangham presents as the “exquisitely successful designs” achieved by evolutionary process, folklorists might see something more like the workings of tradition. The Scenario Itself: Cooking and the Cooking Cluster In discussing Lévi-Strauss’s view of the importance of cooking, Wrangham quotes a famous line from The Raw and the Cooked in which Lévi-Strauss attempts to summarize tersely the message of the traditional cooking-fire myth: [End Page 117] Not only does cooking mark the transition from nature to culture, but through it and by means of it, the human state can be defined with all its attributes. (quoted in Wrangham 2009 , 11) 9 As suggested above—and although the author himself does not put it this way—it is as if Wrangham’s book is an attempt to prove that this mythic transition summarized by Lévi-Strauss but confined by him to “psychological” reality should instead be given the status of a literally true account of a crucial development in human evolutionary history.

The convergence concerns more than cooking per se, for in both accounts—the mythic (as summarized by Lévi-Strauss) and the scientific (as argued by Wrangham)—cooking lies at the center of a cluster of distinctively human characteristics that accompany and are made possible by it. The mythic cluster and the scientific cluster, if not identical, exhibit a good deal of overlap. In summarizing the mythology of cooking-fire, the following contrasts are those that Lévi-Strauss most persistently calls to our attention: relationships of marriage, exogamy, and exchange as opposed to isolation; technologically assisted as opposed to rudimentary subsistence; well-mannered as opposed to ill-mannered social behavior; and dress (ornament and clothing) as opposed to nudity. 10 What does Wrangham have to say on such matters? Following an analysis of the nutritional data marshaled to convince the reader of a shift to a cooked diet among habilines that gave rise to Homo erectus, Wrangham turns to a reconstruction of broader changes in the organization of life that would have been ushered in through such a dietary change. In his reconstruction we find counterparts to the full cluster presented by Lévi-Strauss.

Wrangham does not specifically mention dress, but he emphasizes at length the role of fire in making possible the state that forms the precursor to dress, namely, hairlessness, which he regards as beneficial to hunting (because it permits a more rapid dissipation of heat from exertion). Although he gives elaborate treatment to the division of labor ushered in by cooking, Wrangham’s focus is largely the development of the male-female marital bond and the division of labor within this arrangement; he does not invoke the issue of endogamy versus exogamy explicitly. Still, socio-cultural anthropologists generally view exogamy as a primary means of alliance formation, and it should be noted that Wrangham argues that as a consequence of the cooking diet, social skills would have advanced. For example, [End Page 118] As tolerance and communication ability increased, individuals would have become better at reaching a mutual understanding, forming alliances, and excluding the intolerant. Such changes in social temperament would have contributed to a growing ability to communicate, including the evolution of language.

(2009, 185) In traditional mythologies, clothing and body decoration, rules for social living, and fish-weirs, bows-and-arrows, or other tools are typically bequeathed by the same culture-hero that brings fire, suggesting a suddenness and simultaneity for the cluster that comprises our human endowment. In his discussion of the benefits of hairlessness, Wrangham mentions also the cost: But Homo erectus could have lost their hair only if they had an alternative system for maintaining body heat at night. Fire offers that system. (2009, 183) Wrangham does not mention here the other obvious possibility: some sort of protective covering or precursor to clothing. Whether or not the archaeological evidence lends any credence to this possibility, it is worth noting that in general one of the qualities distinguishing the spirit of the mythological cooking cluster from the scientific one is that in the latter the various elements of the cluster are overtly in competition with one another: theories and reputations ride on which is causal and which are consequential in the transition to humanity.

Lévi-Strauss argues that cooking has primacy within the mythological cluster; 11 however, it would seem that further competition among the factors, if it exists at all, is more subtle than that which we encounter in scientific argumentation. Parenthetically, problems in scientifically distinguishing the causal from the consequential are not confined, in Wrangham’s analysis, to the relationships between the elements of the cluster. For example, at one point Wrangham says that prior to cooking, “we ate more like chimpanzees, everyone for themselves” (2009, 152). But a little later he says that “[if] the first cooks were temperamentally like chimpanzees, life would have been absurdly difficult for females or low-status males trying to cook a meal” (158). Cooking seems to presuppose, in order to get started, the social cooperation that it supposedly gives rise to in our species. The scenario itself—cooking as pivot among an associated cluster of transitions in way of life—is the most important site of convergence between mythology and science on the matter of cooking and its place [End Page 119] in the development of humanity.

But two other smaller clusters are also worthy of further consideration; I will summarize them in the briefest terms. The first cluster is a trio of related elements that combine in interesting and ambiguous ways; they are (1) fire, (2) cooking, and (3) meat. In both scientific and mythological scenarios it is often difficult to determine whether one of these elements is the focus, and if so, which one. According to Wrangham, the transition from habiline to Homo erectus (made possible by cooking) was preceded by the transition from australopithecine to habiline (made possible by meat-eating). However, these transitions are not presented as strictly cumulative, for although Wrangham discusses the benefits of cooked meat, he nowhere says categorically that the benefits and the evolutionary transformation allowed by cooking require that the cooked food be cooked meat—it is cooking that is the basis for the second transition. He is also at pains to distinguish his hypothesis—the “cooking hypothesis”—from the “Man-the-hunter” hypothesis, in which meat figures pivotally. Still, Wrangham seems very interested in meat, and especially cooked meat.

At various points he also brings into his analysis important evolutionary benefits of fire that extend beyond cooking, such as warmth and protection. Regarding mythology, almost everyone has heard of Prometheus’s theft of fire. The benefits that have been read into this theft range from the immediate practical ones of warmth, lengthening of daylight, and cooking, to more abstract boons, such as leisure and/or the inspiration and freedom to pursue philosophy and art. Less known is that this theft was preceded by another trick that Prometheus played on the gods. Homeric-age poet Hesiod, in his great synthesis of Greek mythology, tells us that Prometheus set up a deception regarding the distribution between gods and men of the original sacrificial victim; specifically, he tricked Zeus into choosing the bones as the gods’ portion so that humans would ever after receive the meat (Theogony, lines 507–616). It was in retribution for this prior trick that Zeus decided to withhold fire from humans, precipitating Prometheus’s famous theft. What is the relationship between these two events? Is the punishment fitted to the crime (i.e., what good is meat without cooking-fire)? What is the real gift of Prometheus? Fire-in-general? Cooking-fire? Meat?

Cooked meat? As alluded to above, Prometheus is sometimes invoked as benefactor of something more lofty—ultimately, liberation from a life of purely utilitarian pursuits. The Prometheus myth symbolizes the triumph of [End Page 120] light and reason over darkness and superstition: fire allows for extended hours of light and increased leisure time in which to invent art and philosophy. Wrangham’s sixth chapter, “How Cooking Frees Men,” resonates with such themes, but in each case the author ties these freedoms to “biological reality.” According to Wrangham, the founding freedom that gives rise to humanity is freedom from chewing; it is to this, and not to fire-as-lamp, that Wrangham refers when he claims that in becoming human we “gained several hours of daytime” (2009, 146): “Men, liberated from the simple biological demands of a long day’s commitment to chewing raw food, engage in productive or unproductive labor as they wish” (130).

The theme of unleashing reason, which one typically encounters in lofty interpretations of Prometheus, also has a biological counterpart in Wrangham—specifically in his view that the freedom to hunt broadens the quest for superior “brain foods”: The softness of their cooked plant foods selected for smaller teeth, the protection fire provided at night enabled them to sleep on the ground and lose their climbing ability, and females likely began cooking for males, whose time was increasingly free to search for more meat and honey. While other habilines elsewhere in Africa continued for several hundred thousand years to eat their food raw, one lucky group became Homo erectus—and humanity began. (194) Wrangham also says that cooking freed women’s time, but at the cost of trapping them in a “newly subservient role” (177).

It is as though cooking ushered in a division of labor between the genders and, along with it, interdependence and inequality, a situation that might be summarized (if I may reinterpret a title from chef Bobby Flay) as “boy meets grill.” Whether or not Wrangham’s arguments stand as science, it seems not inappropriate to note here that when Prometheus tricked Zeus (for the second time) by stealing fire, Zeus once more hit back—this time by creating woman (Pandora) as an irresistible curse for men. Hence it is once again the conquest of fire, this time in mythic idiom, that ushers in gender-interdependence and strife. I will return to this point below. One more triad of possibilities (and sometimes of ambiguities) should be kept in mind when considering the convergence of mythic and scientific scenarios of the domestication of fire: specifically, the relationships between (1) tending fire, (2) transporting fire, and (3) making fire.

A perusal of comparative mythologist James Frazer’s world compilation Myths of the Origin of Fire (1930) suffices to confirm that [End Page 121] each of these capacities, and the states of existence they allow, can be singled out for attention in world fire mythology. For example, one Maori fire myth begins most curiously, with the Polynesian culture hero Maui secretly extinguishing all the fires in his village. Consequently, he is told that he must visit the great female deity Mahuika, cosmic source of fire, and secure new fire for the village. Instead, Maui engages Mahuika in a cosmic combat that threatens to extinguish all fire; just before she is conquered, however, Mahuika throws some sparks into the kaikomako and other trees where it can hide (and from which humans can now extract fire through ignition by friction) ( Grey 1906 , 31ff.). In other words, this story posits as summum bonum not the acquisition of fire to tend (when the story opens, our ancestors already have this), but rather the acquisition of the ability to make fire anew rather than having to seek it from a cosmic source.

There is significant variation in world fire mythology with regard to relative emphasis on tending, transporting, and making fire—and also concerning the specifics and origins of these practices. Without going into detail, I note that Wrangham’s book makes it abundantly clear that such concerns have sparked speculative ruminations by an evolutionary scientist that rival the best offered by the Maori, the Bororo, and the Andaman Islanders (see especially 2009, 186–94). Intriguingly, in his book Wrangham mentions only one (unusual) interpretation of the Prometheus myth, a version in which Prometheus is not hero but anti-hero. Specifically, Wrangham discusses a famous essay in which the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley blames all manner of human malady on the meat-eating made possible by Prometheus’s conquest of fire (2009, 24); the theme is echoed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (subtitled The Modern Prometheus). As part of his larger dismissal of the contemporary raw-food movement, Wrangham also dismisses this anti-heroic version of Prometheus.

Thus, by negating a negative, Wrangham ends up broadly aligned with the more positive, and more common, interpretation of Prometheus. 12 Mythic Time, Scientific Time While the temporal frameworks into which mythological stories are cast vary considerably, certain types are recurrent. One elementary type of temporal framework analytically isolated by comparative mythologists is built upon two planes of time—a now and a [End Page 122] then—accompanied by only minimal regard for what lies before the first plane, after the second, or in-between the two. Franz Boas identified this temporal framework (1905), and Lévi-Strauss elaborated upon it in his discussion of so-called totemic societies/mythologies (1970, 217ff.). Mircea Eliade’s much-cited notion of myth as existing in illo tempore (in “that” time, as opposed to “this” time) resonates with this framework (e.g., 1971). Within the mythic plane itself even the relative order of events may be undefined.

Ultimate origins may be given little attention, the emphasis going instead to events that constitute a one-time changeover between the mythic plane and the plane of the present. Totemic ancestors or culture heroes such as Native American Coyote or Raven are often “transformers” more than “creators,” effecting the changeover by bequeathing within their lifetimes social norms and material culture—a design for living and the technologies to support it. The mythic plane becomes saturated with stories about the origins of all that we regard as defining ourselves. Not all mythologies take shape in such a two-planed or “totemic” temporal framework, but many do, or at least invoke something like this framework at certain moments or in specific contexts. One other point is especially important to the two-planed model. Specifically, although the two planes are set apart by temporal distance—“this” versus “that” time—they have a special relationship in that the earlier plane constitutes the fixed, ongoing generative ground of the later one, which, at privileged moments (for example in ritual) can revert to and affirm its unity with the former. The temporal frameworks proffered in science are also varied and subject to ongoing revision.

At times the two-planed mythic model just described would have been seen as the very antithesis of the scientific view, notably so in the nineteenth-century aftermath of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (published in the early 1830s). Lyell promoted uniformitarianism, or the view that the earth developed through the slowly accumulating effects of processes that remain constant and can even now be seen operating in the world. The theory contrasted sharply with the sudden upheavals depicted in religion and mythology. However, in the context of present-day notions such as “punctuated equilibrium” and “the butterfly effect,” and given scientific validation of catastrophic events such as the extinction of the dinosaurs, uniformitarianist assumptions are now more tempered; in some cases, scientific narratives even include moments of something [End Page 123] like the two-planed mythic model. Especially in works of popularizing science, we now have an ongoing industry in which new origin stories tell us about how our contemporary selves—bodies, minds, cognitive functions, emotions—took shape in a privileged paleo-illo-tempore, the exact chronological location of which is not a matter of great concern to the general reader.

Such origin scenarios often exhibit ingenious speculations with a “ just-so” flair even while encased within the Darwinian framework (emphasizing survival advantage within the process of natural selection) that forms the metanarrative of this new species of origin story. 13 Wrangham offers a number of such speculative little scenarios, sometimes chained together in a sequence. For example: An important step in fire’s becoming a central part of human lives was to maintain it at night. Suppose some habilines carried a smoldering log by day to protect against predators, then left it at the base of a sleeping tree . . . . Once they kept fire alive at night, a group of habilines in a particular place occasionally dropped food morsels by accident, ate them after they had been heated, and learned that they tasted better. Repeating their habit, this group would have swiftly evolved into the first Homo erectus. (2009, 193–94) Having concluded that cooking brought about the great pivotal transformation, Wrangham then seeks to segment more finely his denouement by correlating the subsequent “steady rise in brain size” with “a series of improvements in cooking techniques” (122).

Although he makes a few references to archaeological findings relevant to different forms of cooking, what Wrangham does in this section is for the most part what any myth-maker does: he looks around the world to see what it contains (different cooking techniques, for instance) and then finds places for these things in his story. The temporal perspective offered by Wrangham is more sophisticated than those often encountered in works of popularizing science; among other things he posits more than one plane of time, insisting on two major transitions in the dietary evolution of Homo sapiens. And yet the two-planed mythic model is sometimes called to mind by Wrangham’s analysis, especially when he leaps (as is his tendency) over what has happened between the now and the “mysterious initial moment” that particularly interests him: the cooking transition (2009, 186). For example, Wrangham wants to know what nutrition studies of the contemporary raw-food movement might tell us about the diets [End Page 124] of our evolutionary ancestors.

Briefly, he interprets the evidence as showing that those now following exclusively raw-food diets do not do very well nutritionally, and he enlists this finding to lead into his theory of an evolutionary change that took place around 1.8 million years ago, in which the costs and benefits of raw food were traded in for an overall better ratio of benefits to costs with cooked food. He makes a strong case for how rapidly major evolutionary change can occur—in this case, to digestive systems—sometimes within a few thousand years (92ff.). He wants the data from contemporary raw-food movements to be relevant to the trade-in that occurred, in an evolutionarily brief time, at our genus-formative moment. But Wrangham does not present a method for eliminating the possibility that difficulty in getting enough calories from raw food—the problem experienced by contemporary raw-foodies—is other than a very recent development within our species. Uniformitarianism as methodological principle legitimized the retrojection of the present into the past; but the possibility of rapid evolutionary change, recognized in more recent times by Wrangham and other evolutionary scientists—and also promoted by recent theories of “epigenetic” factors in evolution—can only undermine confidence in such retrojection.

It is not just with respect to the biology of digestion that Wrangham moves easily from the present to our paleo-formative time, allowing these to merge into a single moment. As noted above, he also sees cooking as ushering in a distinct social-organizational complex with the male/female bond at the center. Wrangham tends to regard this complex as a universal core of human adaptation—a core that is still with us in modern society, and one that gives rise to a “worldwide irony”: Cooking freed women’s time and fed their children, but it also trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture. Cooking created and perpetuated a novel system of male cultural superiority. It is not a pretty picture. (2009, 177) In the Prometheus story, one aspect of woman-as-curse-to-mankind is that men must evermore labor not only to feed women but also to satisfy their craving for luxury.

Hesiod likens the relationship of men and women to that of worker-bees and drones (lines 507–616), the latter remaining home in the shade of the hive to feed on another’s labors—again, not a pretty picture, but one that reverses the gender hierarchy portrayed by Wrangham. Neither portrayal, however, is [End Page 125] monolithic. In Wrangham, men enslave women, yet become more dependent upon them (see 2009, 175); for Hesiod, women enslave men, yet it surely does nothing for women’s status to enter the cosmos as a curse. I hazard to speculate that these disparate views regarding which gender enslaves the other are not the result solely of Wrangham being a scientist and Hesiod a poet.

Wrangham is thinking paleolithically (and espousing a not unheroic view of the hunt), while Hesiod is thinking neolithically, within a framework created by a momentous transformation in subsistence that lies between our “now” and our paleo-formative “then.” Rather than the hunt epitomizing men’s work, Hesiod almost certainly has in mind the onerous labor of agriculture; for in his other great poem, Works and Days, Hesiod once again tells of Prometheus and Pandora, and, in a disquisition often likened to a farmer’s almanac, leaves little doubt that the drudgery that Zeus, in his wrath, visited on men is epitomized in agriculture. Given that evolutionary science has succeeded (too well?) in creating broad public acceptance of a myth-like double-planed time—a now and a privileged paleo-moment, one recognized as uniquely formative in our species character—there can be no surprise when that moment becomes a battlefield of contemporary culture wars.

Bronislaw Malinowski revolutionized the study of mythology by insisting—contra the armchair tradition of classics scholars studying ancient civilizations—that myth must be studied alive, as is done by the anthropologist, with the “myth-maker at his elbow” (1954, 100). Malinowski’s approach to narratives being told by the Trobriand Islanders brought home a realization that in traditional mythic narratives, struggles set in the ancient past often reflect contemporary sociocultural contestations; his famous example was the reflection of presentday strategies and dynamics of clan prestige and influence projected in ongoing reformulations of clan origin myths (111ff.). Taking this insight to the extreme, mythology amounts to a projection into the past of present-day culture wars. Decades ago, the man-the-hunter hypothesis gave rise to a feminist response. 14 As implied above, controversial gender issues have a significant presence in Wrangham’s book, but more noticeable is the attention given to contemporary food fights, especially those stirred up by the raw-food movement. Four of the seven cover praise-blurbs (including the one that appears on the front, by Michael Pollan) are attributed to food writers of various kinds rather than to specialists in evolutionary science.

Wrangham’s first main [End Page 126] chapter confronts the nutritional claims made by contemporary rawfood proponents, and his epilogue—“The Well-Informed Cook”—deals with current popular debates about nutrition, including the ideas of Pollan. The mythic way to argue the merits of different contemporary alternatives is to refer them to a founding moment or “charter”—a term Malinowski used to characterize the cultural force exerted by traditional origin myths. In a convergent spirit, we nowadays refer contemporary nutritional and other debates to visions of our evolutionary moment of origin, although we do this, interestingly, in two opposed ways. In the tradition of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, we sometimes refer contemporary appetitive, emotional, and cognitive proclivities to a moment of origin in order to understand why and how we need to curb or modify those tendencies, since traits adaptive in paleo-environments may be maladaptive within the context of “civilization.” On the other hand, contemporary problems such as clogged arteries are sometimes seen as a consequence of a departure from our archaic nutritional charter (which some believe to be grounded in raw food, a position Wrangham dismisses).

But Wrangham adopts both ways of relating to the charter; on the one hand, he argues that cooking is part of our human charter and we should not imagine that we improve our nutrition by departing from it. On the other hand, he accepts that our particular adaptation, which promoted our large brains in conditions of scarcity, can make overconsumption all too easy in conditions of plenty. Idolatry of Fire Following a recent scientifically hard-boiled lecture on human evolution, I approached the speaker in the hopes of getting some clarification on the archaeological record of fire-use. I was astounded at his response: instead of number-crunching, the speaker produced an outpouring of lyrical reflections on fire as the center of social and cultural life. We find such poetizing moments in all fire-writers, including Wrangham, whose first such interlude begins, How lucky that Earth has fire. Hot, dry plant material does this amazing thing: it burns. In a world full of rocks, animals, and living plants, dry, combustible wood gives us warmth and light, without which our species would be forced to live like other animals. It is easy to forget what life [End Page 127] would have been like without fire.

The nights would be cold, dark, and dangerous, forcing us to wait helplessly for the sun. All our food would be raw. No wonder we find comfort by a hearth. (2009, 9) 15 Some sort of immediate emotional response seems to go with the experience and idea of fire, even in the context of science, and I would find it hard to believe, given the testimonials by scientists themselves, that this response does not in some way feed into their views on its evolutionary significance. Phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard refuses to confine fire-reverie to the archaic, insisting on “the secret persistence of this idolatry of fire” (1968, 4). The phenomenology and symbolism of fire are complex topics requiring their own full analyses; here I will comment on just one issue that may be of relevance to both mythology and evolutionary science. Briefly, for either myth or science, I must ask whether fire (rather than cooking) might not offer the more immediately appealing symbolic image of humanity—even if it be definitively established that it was cooking that allowed humanity to emerge.

One advantage of fire over cooking as symbol or totem of humanity is that the former may be perceived as more visibly empowering, speaking directly to a greater number of practical needs. Fire also has an advantage in its sheer fascination as substance—enigmatic, full of life, filling the world with bold contrast and subtle shadow. 16 According to Wrangham, it is cooking that unleashes the energy available in food; yet the energy of cooked food is less immediately visible than is the energy of fire. Cooked food as image can stray from the heroic into the decadent (recall the feasting scene of Fellini’s Satyricon!). However, the matter is admittedly not simple, for death and cooking—or the ultra-cooking of holocaust—are at the center of “life-giving” rituals of sacrifice. 17 Such complications aside, I note that even though Lévi-Strauss has pulled out the opposition of raw versus cooked as the source of the messages contained in traditional mythologies, the narratives in such myths most often flow from the adventure of acquiring fire—typically by theft or by trickery, often with dramatic touches such as, in many Native American variants, a family of relay runners handing off the fire to one another.

A similar relationship between fire and cooking inheres in Wrangham’s analysis, and this may be part of the reason that it can be difficult for the reader to keep track of his foci (fire, cooking, or meat). Consider again Wrangham’s poetic passage quoted [End Page 128] above; note that the object of his lyricism is not cooking, but fire (cooking is the last of several benefits he mentions). The same relationship is visible even in Wrangham’s title, which follows the common academic format of, in effect, two titles (in bibliographies separated by a colon 18 ): the academic convention is that the post-colon title is soberly descriptive, while the pre-colon title attempts an unfettered poetic grab. Note that Wrangham’s descriptive title is about cooking (How Cooking Made Us Human), while his poetic title is about fire (Catching Fire). Minimally, the symbolism of fire and cooking and the relationship of both form one more topic that should be investigated jointly in mythology and science.

The position that myth and science mystically converge can be silly, as it often was in the 1960s; but equally silly is the pretense—still commonly encountered in scientific polemic—that myth and science are necessarily or always at loggerheads. Traditional mythologies repeatedly show themselves eager to incorporate findings from new sources (including science), thus enriching themselves. Surely there are topics and concerns, such as those considered above, in regard to which science could enrich its understanding and perspective by reeling in the polemic and replacing it with a like-spirited, reciprocal engagement of what mythologies and other forms of traditional wisdom have to offer. Wrangham’s arguments are far too speculative to convince beyond doubt that the humanity-creating transformation depicted in mythology as brought about by cooking-fire is literally true rather than “psychological” (I think Lévi-Strauss would prefer the term “sociological”). Still, given the authority of science in our time, there can be no more commanding testimonial to the socio-logic of the cooking-fire myth than that conferred by Wrangham’s scientific claim.

Gregory Schrempp Gregory Schrempp Gregory Schrempp, Associate Professor of Folklore at Indiana University, is the author of Magical Arrows: The Maori, the Greeks, and the Folklore of the Universe (1992), The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science (forthcoming), and numerous articles on comparative cosmology and the history of the study of folklore and mythology. ( gschremp@indiana.edu ) Acknowledgment I wish to thank William Hansen, Daniel Peretti, and Mary Magoulick for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Footnotes 1. See discussions of the provincial versus the cosmopolitan, and this binary’s relevance to the myth/folklore versus science opposition, in Latour 1993 and Bauman and Briggs 2003 . [End Page 129] 2. Particularly noticeable are the mathematical symbols invoked by Lévi-Strauss, notoriously in a formula that claims to be the universal formula of all myths (1967, 225). 3.

Wrangham’s epigram appears to be a composite from Radcliffe-Brown’s The Andaman Islanders (see 1922, 258, 342ff.). The “us” does not appear in Radcliffe-Brown’s passage; has someone along the line unconsciously generalized the Andamanese sentiments? Wrangham’s choice of the Andaman Islands (among many other possible ethnographic sources for similar mythic notions about the centrality of cooking-fire to humanity) constitutes an intriguing and, for mythologists, resonant choice for launching a book about the same idea. In the great nineteenth-century heyday of ethnological scholars trying to pin down an ancient homeland for the world’s mythological heritage, India was a popular choice—owing in part to the “Indo-European” hypothesis and to the comparative mythology of Friedrich Max Müller. On Müller and India, see Chaudhuri 1974 . 4. In an analysis of the Greek myth of Oedipus, Lévi-Strauss famously remarked that Freud’s analysis of the Oedipus myth/complex could be approached as a variant among variants of this ancient story (1967, 213). 5.

A particularly famous instance of this type of opening, one perhaps influential in initiating the trend, is found in Steven Weinberg’s modern classic The First Three Minutes, which begins with a Norse myth about the cosmos originating with a giant and a cow. Weinberg declares that the episode is “not a very satisfying picture” and proceeds to tell us about the Big Bang (1984, 1). 6. Lévi-Strauss argues that traditional mythologies and magical practices operate under the assumption that phenomena that produce similar sensations (of taste, smell, touch, etc.) bear a relationship of substance or even cause, and that modern chemistry often confirms a chemical basis for such similarities. Distinctions and connections made by chemical analysis are, he writes, “no surprise to our aesthetic sense. On the contrary they increase its scope and understanding by supplying a basis for the associations it already divined; and at the same time one is better able to understand why and in what conditions it should have been possible to discover such associations solely by the systematic use of intuitive methods” (1970, 12).

Lévi-Strauss also argues, in The Raw and the Cooked, that myths encode propositions about human existence in the tangible qualities perceived through the senses; as there are five senses, there are five codes, and among these the “gustatory code”—the one concerned with eating habits—is privileged (1969, 164). 7. The twentieth-century sociological “functionalist” paradigm, springing from the work of Emile Durkheim and his followers, posed a similar dilemma and attracted considerable criticism: if one is convinced that social phenomena exist because they provide some necessary function to society, then it is always possible to imagine some sort of functionality, however indirect or counterintuitive. 8. “In mythology it is a universal characteristic of men born from the Earth that at the moment they emerge from the depth they either cannot walk or they walk clumsily” ( Lévi-Strauss 1967 , 212). 9. The passage occurs originally in Lévi-Strauss 1969 , at page 164. 15.

Fire-rhapsodizing moments in other modern fire myths include Freud 1960 and Barrow 1995 (96). 16. The line of doggerel that you have just read might be taken as one more little illustration of the instinctual urge to join the ranks of poets that takes hold when the topic is fire. 17. Walter Burkert has carried out an elaborate analysis of ancient Greek mythico-ritual sacrificial complexes, connected to a claim of the centrality of hunting in paleolithic culture (1983). 18. For books about digestion, the titles are not only separated by a colon but also joined by a colon. References Cited Bachelard, Gaston. 1968. The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Boston: Beacon. Barrow, John. 1995. The Artful Universe. New York: Oxford University Press. Bauman, Richard, and Charles Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boas, Franz. 1905. “The Mythologies of the Indians.” International Quarterly 11:327–42.

Boyd, Brian. 2009. On the Origin of Stories. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burkert, Walter. 1983. Homo Necans. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Chaudhuri, Nirad. 1974. Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of the Rt. Hon. Friedrich Max Müller. New York: Oxford University Press. Dahlberg, Frances, ed. 1981. Woman the Gatherer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. [End Page 131] Dutton, Denis. 2009. The Art Instinct. New York: Bloomsbury. Eliade, Mircea. 1971. The Myth of the Eternal Return. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frazer, James. 1930. Myths of the Origin of Fire. London: Macmillan. Freud, Sigmund. 1960. “The Acquisition and Control of Fire.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol.

22, edited by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 187–93. London: Hogarth. Grey, George. 1906. Polynesian Mythology. London: George Routledge and Sons. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lee, Richard, and Irven DeVore, eds. 1969. Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1967. “The Structural Study of Myth.” In Structural Anthropology, 202–28. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ———. 1969. The Raw and the Cooked. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1970. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1971. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon. ———. 1973. From Honey to Ashes. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1978. The Origin of Table Manners. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1981.

The Naked Man. New York: Harper and Row. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1954. Magic, Science, and Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Numazawa, K. 1984. “The Cultural-Historical Background of Myths on the Separation of Sky and Earth.” In Sacred Narrative, edited by Alan Dundes, 182–92. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Pollan, Michael. 2009. Food Rules. New York: Penguin. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1922. The Andaman Islanders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schrempp, Gregory. 1992. Magical Arrows. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. In press. The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Wade, Nicholas. 2009. The Faith Instinct. New York: Penguin. Weinberg, Steven. 1984. The First Three Minutes. Toronto: Bantam. Wrangham, Richard. 2009. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

New York: Basic. [End Page 132] Copyright © 2011 Indiana University Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology

Question: Anthropologist Lévi-Strauss proposed that two animals achieved mythic status in Native American cultures as they are the mediators between life and death. Can you name one of the two?
Answer: Coyote (or) raven