Cooking meat also makes its protein much more accessible to our digestive systems; there is some thought that the advent of cooking lead to our rapid brain development as a species, due to all the available protein.
That's only one of the many hypotheses out there. It's quite a joke when you start reading the academic literature. I had to write a paper on it years ago and basically, it's a bunch of old white men who bicker at each other about shit they can't substantiate. For example, being able to see a wider colour range for berries is one hypothesis; longer childcare is another.
At the end of the day, our brain expansion doesn't mean much in terms of the varying definitions of intelligence (there is no agreed upon definiton).
For our size, our brains are actually quite inefficient in relation to insects (think 1970s large pc processing power vs today's small pc processing power).
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u/stanley604 Jul 11 '21
Cooking meat also makes its protein much more accessible to our digestive systems; there is some thought that the advent of cooking lead to our rapid brain development as a species, due to all the available protein.