Why Did Ancient Humans Start Cooking Food?

Right now there's a stove in your house. You didn't think twice about it. But that one decision — applying heat to raw food — is what separated your ancestors from literally every other creature on Earth. And the reason they started doing it had nothing to do with hunger. In this video: why your gut is too small, what 1.8 million year old bones actually show us, how cooking redirected energy from the gut to the brain, and the thing nobody talks about — cooking may have invented the human relationship. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CHAPTERS: 0:00 The stove you didn't think about 0:25 Your gut is too small 1:05 The story most people know 1:43 Life before fire 2:39 The six-hour problem 3:26 We don't know when it happened 3:44 What the bones tell us 4:44 Richard Wrangham — the cooking hypothesis 5:39 Energy rerouted into the brain 6:19 The more interesting part 7:04 The first meal 8:12 What the campfire created 9:07 The oldest agreement 9:42 We cannot go back 10:59 Cooking invented you ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ SOURCES: Richard Wrangham — Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009) Wonderwork Cave — Berna et al., PNAS (2012) Brain and gut trade-off — Aiello & Wheeler, Current Anthropology (1995) Chimpanzee chewing — Organ et al., PNAS (2011) ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ancient humans cooking food | human evolution | why did humans start cooking | cooking hypothesis | Richard Wrangham | prehistoric humans | early human history