Meat + Fire = Us: Is Barbecue at the Root of Being Human?

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This week, Chronicle reviewer-in-chief Michael Bauer made no bones about championing Wexler's, a smoke-centric restaurant that opened in June in an old converted Financial District firehouse. He predicted purists would "cringe" at the buzzed newcomer's attempt to elevate barbecue to the realm of "oversized white plates" and fancy cocktails. He shouldn't worry; they won't, because Wexler's isn't purely, by construct, a barbecue restaurant, just what sounds like a very good one, inspired by a number of tweaked and twisted Southern signifiers -- like beans, bourbon, and buttermilk, as well as barbecue -- rendered into a cohesive, upscale whole.

Our own Meredith Brody kicked off her laudatory review of Wexler's with a little 'cue context: "It's easy to imagine the earliest form of cooking -- throwing meat onto a wood fire, from which it emerges smoky and charred -- evolving into what we now celebrate as barbecue, with all its attendant rituals."

Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham, the director of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in Uganda, wants to take it a step further. To him, barbecue is not merely an ancient rite -- and, as we know it best, a Southern cultural treasure -- ripe for fusion-y fiddling; it is a key, perhaps the key, to understanding ourselves. In his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Wrangham comes to the finger-licking conclusion that humanity's greatest leap came, not from learning to farm, or make tools, but a little over two million years ago, when habilines ("the missing link" between apes and humans) first discovered the pleasures of flame-bathed meat -- barbecue in its earliest, least prissy incarnation.

According to Wrangham, meat cooked over a fire encouraged speedier human evolution. Tender vittles permitted our first ancestors to chew less. Less chewing meant they had more free time with which to explore their surroundings. Since guts were now correspondingly smaller, brains were routed more energy, allowing them to become larger and more able, which meant they could use that extra time to think of ways to better their lives. Because these folks could also get more energy in general out of their food, they could survive longer and reproduce faster. There's a lot more to it, but Wrangham even holds barbecue indirectly responsible for patriarchy, a form of social rule he says emerged around cooking.

So, whether you're savoring slow-smoked sturgeon with parsnip puree at Wexler's, or ripping down 64 on a Southeastern barbecue vision quest, hunting ribs in the shadows, searching for mutton in the mist, keep in mind: according to Jane Goodall's broseph, the tradition you enjoy and seek out -- in whatever form, be it pure, adapted, inspired, run-down, or gussied-up -- was an early biological motivation, not just the product of a long history of delicious cultural influence.