National Geographic Daily News Western lowland gorillas forage
for raw food in Pointe-Noire, Congo.  Primates (such as these
western lowland gorillas in Pointe-Noire, Congo) have smaller
brains due to their raw food diet.  Photograph by Michael
Nichols, National Geographic  Nicholas Mott  National Geographic
News  Published October 26, 2012  Did you eat a hot meal today?
It's a smart thing to do, as our ancestors learned.  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 Biome