Cooking: The secret to the evolution of the human brain

A new study shows raw food by itself isn't enough to fuel our billions of neurons

Cooking
(Image credit: Thinkstock/Stockbyte)

Gorillas, of course, dwarf your average human. To fuel their massive bodies, the hulking primates spend as many as 10 hours of their day eating. If our close ape relatives spend so much time adding fuel to their bodies, scientists have wondered, why are our brains so much larger than theirs? A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences might have an answer: Cooked food.

"Brains demand exceptional amounts of energy," says Ed Yong at Discover Magazine — energy that raw food simply can't provide. That's where cooking comes in.

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