Cooking made us human."
There's a whole shelf of books on it now, a cozy little origin story where our ancestors huddled round a fire, cooked up some roots, unlocked the calories, and grew a big shiny brain out of the steam.
Charming. It's also nonsense, and it collapses the second you check the dates.
Here's the fatal problem, the one that ends the debate before it starts. If cooking made us, the fire has to come first. It has to. And it doesn't. Our line has been evolving for around 2.5 million years, brains swelling the whole way up, and yet widespread, habitual use of fire only turns up somewhere around 400,000 years ago.
That's not a minor timing quibble. That's the entire theory arriving two million years late to explain something that had already happened. You cannot hand the trophy to a runner who showed up after the race was won, the medals were given out, and everyone had gone home.
So what actually grew the brain across those two million fireless years? Meat. Raw, hunted, scavenged, smashed out of the bone. Fat, marrow, organs, the richest food going, needing not a single flame. Eat enough animal, and the gut shrinks, and the brain gets the surplus to balloon. There's your engine. It was roaring long before anyone struck a spark.
And if cooking were truly what made food edible for us, nobody would ever have eaten it raw again. Yet cultures kept merrily doing exactly that, ages after fire was everywhere. The Inuit on raw seal and fish. Steak tartare. Carpaccio. Raw frozen reindeer.
Strange, that, for creatures who supposedly can't function without the stove. Meanwhile, show me the proud tradition of raw grain and raw potato. There isn't one, because that stuff is inedible without a pot, which rather gives the game away.
Because "cooking made us human" was never really about cooking. It's "carbs made us human" wearing a disguise, a story engineered to smuggle starch to the center of the human origin story and let the humble tuber take a bow it never earned.
Cooking made dinner tastier. That's the whole of its contribution.
The meat made us human; it did it raw, and it finished the job while this theory was still fumbling for a match.