Barbecue Makes Big Brains?

Question: Did Primordial Chefs Feed Our Giant Brains?

Anthropologists have assumed that H. erectus ate their burgers and steaks raw, since most early fire pits discovered so far date back about 500,000 years, with the oldest, in Israel, dating back 790,000 years. Charred stones and tools associated with human sites have been discovered that date back as much as 1.5 million years, but these might have been naturally occurring fires.

Now Harvard University's Richard Wrangham has provided some evidence that the very distant ancestors of America's top chefs indeed may have learned to cook their antelope and rabbit. Cooking makes both plants and meat softer and easier to chew, providing more calories with less effort. What's more, human teeth got smaller and duller at around this time, which is the opposite of what would have happened if people had had to rip and chew lots of raw meat...

Paleoanthropologists are excited by Wrangham's findings and provocative ideas, but the absence of definitive proof of campfires appearing at the same time that human brains doubled in size is a problem. Many still believe that humanity's first cooked meal came much later--about 800,000 to 500,000 years ago, when the human noggin began growing again, expanding by about 30 percent into the modern-size brain.