Richard Wrangham

Wow.

Human lips are tiny, weak, and completely incapable of that kind of mechanical processing.

And behind those lips, our jaw strength is almost pitiful compared to our evolutionary cousins.

Like if you put your fingers on the side of your head just above your ears and clench your teeth, you can feel your temporalis muscle flexing.

They need that massive anchor point just to support the extreme bite force required to grind down tough raw vegetation all day.

And we lost that immense jaw power due to a very specific genetic event.

Humans carry a mutation in a gene known as MYH16.

MYH16.

[chuckles] And I know th- one of the biggest problems with the American diet is a lack of fiber, but there is such thing as too much, because too much fiber causes severe bloating and frequent bowel movements.

Also, and I love that Lieberman quotes Richard Wrangham, who's a colleague at Harvard and a friend of his.

Wrangham wrote a book years ago about w- why cooking is so important and such a part of the human experience, but also how it unlocks a lot of nutritional value.

And it's also a necessary form of pre-digestion that neutralizes dangerous plant anti-nutrients and natural toxins such as lectins that are found in raw beans and cyanide in raw cassava.

And the thing that really led me to work at Gombe with Anne was that I had become interested in this question of intergroup relations.

And the Kanyawara chimpanzee community that I had been studying for my doctoral research in a project that Richard Wrangham leads.

They didn't have any neighbors that were habituated, meaning that you could follow them as well as the main research community.

So when interactions occurred between groups, we only had information from one side of the interaction.

But it also had an impact on the chimp behavior in lots of ways because it attracted chimps to a central resource.

It also attracted baboons to a central resource.

And it changed behaviors in a number of ways that Richard Wrangham documented in a 1974 paper where he found that the rates of aggression around the banana feeding station or in the banana feeding area were much higher than in the forest.

And Richard was part of the... know the kind of early pioneers of researchers at Gombe who were focused on well let's follow the chimpanzees away from the banana feeding station and into the forest and collect data he was one of several people who really focused on that and shifted the research back towards focusing on on the wild behavior and when it became clear that banana feeding was having that impact that was one of the things that convinced Jane Goodall to reduce the intensity of banana feeding.

A couple things come to mind.

Christopher Boehm's book, uh, The Moral Origins, and, uh, Richard Wrangham's work on self-domi- uh, domestication.

That is, at some point, humans became more, um, I guess moral or nicer to one another as groups got larger and so forth.

But a- and there's good evolutionary reasons to, uh, how natural selection would select for people that are nicer and more domesticated and so on.

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I just, in this last week, interviewed your colleagues, Dan Lieberman and Richard Wrangham.

Oh, okay.

And our conversations focused more on the developing physical makeup of humans over the last few million years.

So, I mean, the mere fact that some people are completely opposed to capital punishment and in some places you can't do it just suggests the general decline in that sort of thing.

So in the groups of hunter-gatherers that you have studied today, for instance, they still carry out execution.

Well, and here I'm pinching off of my colleague who you interviewed, Richard Wrangham.

So Wrangham has gone through and tried to document all these cases of execution.