Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

by Richard L. Currier

In a fission-fusion society, the individual members of the group often spend their daylight hours scattered throughout the territory of their homeland, each individual or small group setting off in pursuit of some particular kind of plant or animal food in the morning. Later, all return to the home base as the day comes to an end, gathering for safety in the sleeping trees, cliffs, or (in the case of humans) campsites and dwellings.

Fourth, cooked food requires dramatically less time for chewing than raw food. The raw food diet of chimpanzees requires them to chew their food for hours on end. In fact, it has been estimated that chimpanzees spend roughly 50 percent of their waking hours simply chewing their food.