What Makes Us Human? Cooking, Study Says
Surge in brain size 1.8 million years ago linked to cooking, study says.

According to a new study, a surge in human brain size that occurred
roughly 1.8 million years ago can be directly linked to the innovation
of cooking.

Homo erectus, considered the first modern human species, learned to
cook and doubled its brain size over the course of 600,000 years.
Similar size primates—gorillas, chimpanzees, and other great apes, all
of which subsisted on a diet of raw foods—did not.

"Much more than harnessing fire, what truly allowed us to become human
was using fire for cooking," said study co-author Suzana
Herculano-Houzel, a neuroscientist at the Institute of Biomedical
Sciences at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

....

Cooking was the key, said Herculano-Houzel, whose study appeared this
week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Heating our food unlocked nutrition: 100 percent of a cooked meal is
metabolized by the body, whereas raw foods yield just 30 or 40 percent
of their nutrients.

Full article at
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...ealth-science/